Amazon comes to a standstill in the UK: Delivery drivers sit idle

Amazon comes to a standstill in the UK: Delivery drivers sit idle because they can’t access their routes and host of other websites are forced offline in a global outage of Amazon Web Server network

  • Amazon’s website and app crashed after 3.30pm on Tuesday for thousands of users worldwide 
  • Amazon Web Services is also down across the globe, along with Amazon Prime Music and Video and Alexa  
  • Officials stated they have identified the ‘root cause’ of the problem and are working to fix it 
  • Outage was likely due to issues related to application programming interface (API), Amazon said 

Amazon today crashed across the globe leaving drivers unable to access their routes for more than four hours so far today. 

The platform, Amazon Music and Prime video, Alexa, Ring and Amazon Web Services, which offers a series of services for online applications, all started experiencing problems at 3.30pm.

By 7pm, three delivery service partners said an Amazon app used to communicate with delivery drivers is down, leaving vans that were supposed to deliver packages sitting idle with no communication from the company, according to Bloomberg.    

The outage come during the company’s critical Christmas shopping season and could potentially create lasting log-jams at a time where there is already a critical crunch on the supply chain.

Amazon officials earlier stated they have identified the ‘root cause’ of the problem and were working to fix it. 

Amazon said the outage was likely due to issues related to application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

‘We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,’ Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard.

In a later update, the company reported that it was ‘starting to see some signs of recovery’ but could not say when the service will be fully restored. 

‘We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time,’ Amazon stated. 

The Amazon Web Services outage is far worse than the others because it provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies around the world.

The outage has impacted a wide variety of service providers worldwide, among them iRobot, Chime, CashApp, CapitalOne, GoDaddy, the Associated Press, Instacart Kindle and Roku. Some users also reported issues with Disney+, but the app appeared to be back online just before 1pm ET in New York. 

Ring said it was aware of the issue and working to resolve it. ‘A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App,’ iRobot said on its website.  

The United Kingdom is experienced widespread outages of Amazon and AWS-hosted websites

Amazon went down in the UK from 3.30pm as the global outage put a stop to online Christmas shopping

Amazon has gone down across the globe, frustrating thousands of users who are trying to purchase Christmas gifts. DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows North America, parts of Europe and Asia are all experiencing issues

As well as the US – the Amazon outage has affected parts of the United Kingdom, Eurpoe, Pakistan, India and Asia

DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows North America, parts of Europe and Asia are all experiencing issues.

As of 5.35pm, the site showed more than 28,000 issues reported with Amazon Web Services.  

‘We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery,’ the company stated. 

The crash comes just with just 18 days until Christmas, so many people are currently purchasing gifts – but they will have to wait a little longer to fulfill their holiday list.

And many consumers have flocked to Twitter to share this frustration.

Twitter user ‘The Public Archive’ tweeted: ‘Amazon is down. The war on Christmas has begun.’

While ‘MoonChild’ is upset the platform crashed right in the middle of their Christmas shopping.

Some users are also having issues with Amazon Music, which some consumers pay $16 a month to access. 

Amazon experienced a similar issue in July, when its  services were disrupted for nearly two hours and at the peak of the disruption, more than 38,000 user reports indicated issues with Amazon’s online stores. 

And in June, the company experienced another outage.

The Jeff Bezos-founded company was one of hundreds of websites around the world that went down on June 8 – others were CNN, The New York Times, Shopify, PayPal, Reddit, the White House and British Government.

Reports said issues were caused by a ‘service configuration’ at their server provider Fastly triggered mass outages.

The crash comes just with just 18 days until Christmas, so many people are currently purchasing gifts – but they will have to wait a little longer to fulfill their holiday list

DownDetector shows there were more than 9,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon and its services

Some users are also having issues with Amazon Music, which some consumers pay $16 a month to access

Amazon experienced a similar issue in July, when its services were disrupted for nearly two hours and at the peak of the disruption, more than 38,000 user reports indicated issues with Amazon’s online stores

It’s unclear what the configuration was or whether or not Fastly intended for it to happen but it took three hours for it to be resolved, during which time government websites, media outlets and online shopping sites experienced huge problems. 

Fastly is a CDN (Content Distribution Network) which services businesses by letting them use its global network of servers for their own websites.

The CDN increases internet loading speeds and it also offers cheaper bandwidth but it’s all run on one network.

If that network is compromised, like it was this morning, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all. 

Users have experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months on Amazon, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester .

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