A system outage at Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ:AMZN) is harming the e-commerce company’s delivery operations during the critical holiday period.
Amazon says that the outage is preventing many of its drivers from getting routes or packages and shutting down communication between Amazon and the drivers it relies on.
An Amazon.com app used to communicate with delivery drivers continues to be down. Vans that were supposed to be on the road delivering Christmas packages are sitting idle with no communication from the company. Amazon Flex drivers, independent delivery people who carry parcels in their own cars, also can’t log into Amazon’s app to get assignments.
The problems come amid Amazon’s critical holiday shopping season when the company cannot afford any delays.
The outage began at about 10 a.m. yesterday (December 7). At the height of the outage, the web monitoring site reported more than 20,000 complaints for Amazon and more than 11,000 for the company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services. By 1:45 p.m., the reported outages had declined by about half for AWS and two-thirds for Amazon.
Multiple popular websites were also affected, including those operated by Coinbase, Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD), Disney (NYSE:DIS)and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX). Disney said that though people were able to get into the parks, they were having difficulty checking in online and paying for purchases.
Some Amazon services, including music and video streaming, the voice-activated Alexa platform and security arm, Ring, were also impacted.
Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud-computing provider, selling companies computing power and software services on demand rather than maintaining their own data centers and teams in-house. Its customers include a wide range of industries and governments.
