Amazon Services Down: Whole Foods and Alexa Affected

Amazon is facing some major hiccups as its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), struggles with an outage. This has hit a bunch of Amazon’s services, including Whole Foods stores and Alexa devices.

As of Tuesday evening, Whole Foods had to shut down all its self-checkout lanes. A shopper in Philadelphia noted that the Prime codes couldn’t even be scanned due to the outage. It seems many delivery drivers were also impacted, with some saying they were sent home because their delivery apps weren’t working.

AWS acknowledged the issue on its service health dashboard, indicating that multiple services were experiencing errors and delays. The problem began around 3:12 PM PDT when a part of their Kinesis system started having problems handling incoming data.

The company reassured users that they have identified the root cause and are working hard to fix it. However, they estimated it would take at least a few hours before everything is fully sorted out.

As of later in the evening, updates indicated that while there was some improvement, recovery was progressing slower than expected. People were noticing issues not just with AWS but also with services from other Amazon-owned companies like Ring and Goodreads.

Throughout the day, users reported problems via Downdetector, with hundreds of reports about the outages coming in. One Amazon Flex driver pointed out that the app wasn’t working, which halted package deliveries nationwide.