Amazon’s Prime, Ring and other apps down for thousands of users in U.S.

Several Amazon.com Inc. services including Prime Video, its namesake e-commerce website and applications that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) were down for thousands of users in the United States on December 7.

Meanwhile, Amazon internally blames an ‘as of yet unknown source’ for massive AWS outage, says an insider, adding that an internal AWS analysis pointed to traffic congestion across multiple network devices in the northern Virginia region.

Amazon said the outage was likely due to issues related to application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

“We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard, adding that it has identified the cause and was working to resolve the issue.

Downdetector showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon. It tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.

Other services including Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages.

Ring said it was aware of the issue and working to resolve it. “A major Amazon Web Services [AWS] outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App,” iRobot said on its website.

In June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based content delivery network provider Fastly Inc., a smaller rival of AWS.

In July, Amazon experienced a disruption in its online stores service, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected more than 38,000 users.

Users have experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months on Amazon, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester.