Another AWS outage is causing problems for Coinbase, Slack, and other services

• Amazon Web Services appeared to be experiencing problems early Wednesday.
• This is the third time the cloud-computing service has experienced outages this month.
• When AWS goes down, it takes down large swathes of the internet with it.

Amazon’s web-hosting subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) appeared to experience an outage early Wednesday morning, its third this month.

Outage-tracking website DownDetector indicated users started reporting problems around 7 a.m. EST.

Around the same time, an update to AWS’ status page acknowledged “launch failures and connectivity issues” in one US region. At 8 a.m. EST, Amazon confirmed a “loss of power” at one of its data centers and said it was working to mitigate the issue.

DownDetector also showed spikes in user problem reports around the same time on messenger service Slack, trading platform Coinbase, and game shopfront site Epic Games Store.

Epic Games acknowledged the outage in a tweet.

—Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) December 22, 2021

AWS hosts large parts of the internet, meaning when it experiences problems the ripple effects spread out to lots of different services.

AWS said in a status update at 9:13 EST that it had identified the problem, implemented a fix, and was “seeing recovery” across its network. Downdetector showed a gradual decrease in incident reports from roughly 7:30 a.m. EST.

This is a developing story…