Amazon Web Services suffers huge outage in US, several websites, apps down

Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is the Cloud arm of the commerce giant suffered a huge outage in the US region late on Wednesday affecting several websites and apps and the recovery took a couple of hours.

On Thursday morning (India time), Amazons said it mitigated the impact to the subsystem within its Kinesis Data Streams APIs and other dependable services -- responsible for the processing of incoming requests and are no longer seeing increased error rates or latencies.

"However, we are not yet taking the full traffic load and are working to relax request throttles on the service," Amazon said on its AWS Service Health Dashboard.

"Over the next few hours we expect to relax these throttles to previous levels. We expect customers to begin seeing recovery as these throttles are relaxed over this timeframe".

The multi-hour outage affected a large portion of the Internet.

Several apps and services posted on Twitter that they were experiencing problems with the AWS services.

Some of those were Acorns, Adobe Spark, Autodesk, Coinbase, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot and The Washington Post, among others.

The Down Detector platform also registered spikes in user reports of problems.

"CloudWatch metrics remain delayed in the US-EAST-1 Region. Once we have restored the throttles for Kinesis to previous levels, we will be restoring CloudWatch metrics functionality.

"We expect to see recovery of CloudWatch metrics at that stage for new incoming metrics, but the backlog of metrics may take additional time to populate," Amazon said.