Amazon’s server outage is breaking fast food apps like McDonald’s and Taco Bell

An outage within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud server setup is affecting a number of internet services, including our website. The AWS Health Dashboard notes problems of degradation on multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region that started at around 3PM ET.

Our own Mitchell Clark alerted us to the outage while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail because it seems to have busted Burger King’s mobile app. A peek at DownDetector shows people have also reported issues with McDonald’s and Delta Airlines that may be related, and the Taco Bell app is broken too.

IT workers on Reddit and Hacker News report they can’t access consoles to try to troubleshoot the issues they’re having.

For The Verge, the problems mean that the front page of this site isn’t updating automatically, and while we have a workaround for that, some other parts of the site may fail to update for the time being. The most recent updates from Amazon include one posted at 4:14PM ET, that says, “We are continuing to work to resolve the error rates invoking Lambda functions. We’re also observing elevated errors obtaining temporary credentials from the AWS Security Token Service, and are working in parallel to resolve these errors.” The next update, from 4:38PM ET, says, “We are beginning to see an improvement in the Lambda function error rates. We are continuing to work towards full recovery.”