Aussie streaming and food delivery sites knocked offline by Amazon Web Services
Australians were left without their typical means of entertainment during a gloomy evening on the east coast thanks to problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A number of Australian websites, including streaming services, food delivery companies and news outlets, went offline Sunday afternoon local time after the cloud services platform faced connectivity issues in Sydney.
The Sydney region is currently being lashed with severe storms causing flooding and power outages, but it is unclear whether that has played a role.
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Sydney is one of AWS' key infrastructure regions in the Asia Pacific, along with Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.
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News site Pedestrian.TV was one outlet affected. Vanessa Lawrence, the site's head of editorial, told Mashable Australia the backend was hosted on AWS and that IT suspected the storm may have something to do with it.
Streaming platform Stan also announced on social media it was down thanks to the AWS outage.
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Foxtel had problems with Foxtel Play, Foxtel Go and the Foxtel website after an outage on "some of our online servers," it acknowledged on Twitter. It's unclear if AWS is used by the company -- Foxtel has been approached for comment.
Food delivery service Menulog was also offline.
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Personal finance tool, Pocketbook, also said on Twitter it was down thanks to the AWS glitch, among a wide variety of other online platforms.
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AWS's service health dashboard showed connectivity issues in the Sydney region on its cloud and database services, among others.
A spokesperson for Amazon also pointed to the dashboard for the latest information on the issue. He was not able to share when services would return to normal, or the cause.
"We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event within a single Availability Zone in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region," he told Mashable Australia in an email.
The spokesperson could not confirm whether "power event" meant AWS had suffered an outage, but at 5:31 p.m. AEST, the dashboard said in an update that power had been restored to the "affected Availability Zone" and the company was working to restore connectivity.
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Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
