Amazon’s server outage is breaking fast food apps like McDonald’s and Taco Bell (and also The Verge)

Amazon’s server outage is breaking fast food apps like McDonald’s and Taco Bell (and also The Verge)

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 around 3PM ET.

The most recent update from Amazon that was posted at 5PM ET reads, “Many AWS services are now fully recovered and marked Resolved on this event. We are continuing to work to fully recover all services.”

It’s almost impossible to count the number of sites and services that rely on AWS, or across which regions or specific services, so how these issues might affect your internet depends on a lot of things. So far, this doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue as some past AWS outages that have held up deliveries, shut down smart home devices, and busted streaming apps.

Outage notifications for McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell mobile apps
Outage notifications for McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell mobile apps.
Image: Richard Lawler

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 Air Lines 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 the 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.

Update June 13th, 5:12PM ET: Added latest update from AWS and video explaining how much of the internet it hosts.

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