Major outage hits Amazon Web Services; many sites affected

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many popular sites.

The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.

Amazon said in a post an hour after the outage began that it had identified the root cause and was “actively working towards recovery.” The issue primarily affected its services in the Eastern U.S., it said. It did not disclose any additional details about the cause.

Amazon later updated the dashboard to note that the company was “starting to see some signs of recovery. We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time.”

The outage also affected Amazon’s ability to provide status updates, it said.

More information can be found at the AWS Service Health dashboard.