Amazon Web Services (AWS) is facing a major outage that’s affecting websites and services for universities, governments and companies, according to The Associated Press.
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, and said it was working to resolve the issue.
This would be the third outage for the company this year.
AWS provides servers, storage, email and a number of other services to these platforms — effectively keeping large parts of the internet running. The outage is impacting user access to a wide variety of platforms.
Amazon’s web services are among the most widely used, including by the Canadian federal government. Some of the major websites that users reported as experiencing outages Tuesday include the popular streaming service Disney+, the messaging platform Slack, the digital wallet service Venmo, the language app Duolingo, and the stock trading service Robinhood.
Other services, including Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, also shared on social media that they were facing issues.
While the cloud service was down, the internet’s appetite for memes was not. Users quickly took to Twitter to share their unfiltered feelings about the massive outage.
