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Amazon Web Services is back up after a massive outage that hit sites including Roku, Adobe, and Target-owned Shipt

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is back up after being down for most of Wednesday.

"We have restored all traffic to Kinesis Data Streams via all endpoints and it is now operating normally," the company said early Thursday morning.

Scores of websites rely on the internet infrastructure to function. The outage only affected one of AWS's 24 regions, its US-East-1 Region, but it took down many popular web-based services that utilize its servers, like Roku, Flickr, and Adobe Spark, which were among those that have reported issues. The Verge first reported the outage.

Amazon said it had identified the root cause of the outage late Wednesday night, and said it had "completed immediate actions to prevent recurrence."

Down Detector reported more than 1,000 users experiencing problems with the service, which is a massive aspect of Amazon's business. AWS reported $11.6 billion in revenue for Q3 of this year and accounted for more than $3.5 billion of Amazon's $6.2 billion in operating income for the same quarter.

AWS has seen an increase in demand during the pandemic as office workers take to their homes to work remotely and rely more heavily on virtual conferencing software and other office tools. 

David Brown, vice president of AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, told Business Insider's Ashley Stewart in May that it has avoided capacity issues and outages during the pandemic because it began adapting its supply chain in January in response to the health crisis.

"We're working very, very hard behind the scenes to create the illusion of infinite capacity," Brown said.

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Katie is a tech and crypto reporter based in Austin, Texas. She joined Insider in 2018 and focuses heavily on NFTs, blockchain technology, major crypto players, and the booming Web3 space. She has also covered the many happenings in the tech industry, from content moderation and data privacy to antitrust issues and regulation.  Katie graduated from Texas A&M University in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. She began her time at Insider in the company's San Francisco office before moving home to Texas in 2021. You can find her paddleboarding most Saturdays. Reach her at kcanales@jkmperu.com, or follow her on Twitter @KatieCanales1.
Grace Dean was a business reporter at Business Insider's London office between August 2020 and August 2024.Her work focused on the restaurant industry, fast-food giants, retail trends, and the labor market. She also wrote about Google's work culture, gender equality in Iceland, layoffs at Calibrate, and truck drivers' experiences on the road.Prior to joining Business Insider, Grace studied German & Business at Newcastle University and spent a year as the Editor-in-Chief of its student newspaper the Courier.Here are some examples of her coverage:Women in Iceland want you to know it's not a gender equality utopiaFast food feels more expensive than ever before. Here's why.Calibrate's CEO announced layoffs affecting over 150 staff on a Zoom call. Minutes later, their company laptops were wiped.Starbucks workers say customers got ruder during the pandemicBritain's charity stores are going upmarketThe no-frills tactics that help make Aldi so cheapPrivate cleaning companies are turning down business because of staff shortages