Major outage hits Amazon Web Services; many sites affected
Washington, Dec 8 (AP) Amazon's cloud-service network suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many popular sites. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.
Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had mitigated the underlying problem responsible for the outage. Shortly thereafter, it reported that many services have already recovered but noted that others were still working toward full recovery.
The issue primarily affected Amazon web services in the eastern U.S., it said. Problems began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm - among them, Amazon's own e-commerce operations.
In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha confirmed that Amazon's warehouse and delivery operations had also experienced issues as a result of the AWS outage. Rocha added that the company is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines had trouble connecting to the airline. Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines, said spokesperson Morgan Durrant. The airline apologised and encouraged customers to use its website or mobile app instead.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. Customers were still reporting outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reports, more than three hours after they started. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.
Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin said the company's U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. The company has apps that access inventory data, monthly payment calculators, service bulletins and other items. More than 20 apps were affected.
Also according to DownDetector, people trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ reported issues. The McDonald's app was also down. But the airlines American, United, Alaska and JetBlue were unaffected. Kentik saw a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage.
Madory said he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. He said a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved. More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration, he said. This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen.
Technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud said the outage highlights just how badly the internet's original design goal -- to be a distributed network with no central point of failure, making it resilient to mass disasters such as nuclear attack -- has been warped by Big Tech.
When we put everything in one place, be it Amazon's cloud or Facebook's monolith, we're violating that fundamental principle, said Malamud, who developed the internet's first radio station and later put a vital U.S. Security and Exchange Commission database online. We saw that when Facebook became the instrument of a massive disinformation campaign, we just saw that today with the Amazon failure.
It was unclear how, or whether, the outage was affecting the federal government. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email response to questions that it was working with Amazon to understand any potential impacts this outage may have for federal agencies or other partners.
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ED raids Kolkata Police deputy commissioner, businessman in PMLA probe
Kolkata (PTI): The Enforcement Directorate on Sunday conducted raids at the premises of Kolkata Police Deputy Commissioner Shantanu Sinha Biswas and a local businessman as part of a money laundering probe against an alleged criminal and his linked syndicate in the poll-bound state, officials said.
Two premises of Biswas, including his residence in Ballygunge area and one location of the businessman named Joy Kamdar, Managing Director of a company named Sun Enterprise, have been raided under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Kamdar has been taken by the officials to the local ED office for questioning. Biswas, chief coordinator and nodal officer of the West Bengal and Kolkata Police welfare committee, was not present at his premises, they said.
The action is linked to a money laundering case against an alleged local criminal named Biswajit Podder alias Sona Pappu, who is booked in multiple cases on charges of attempted murder and extortion.
The federal probe agency had conducted the first round of searches in this case on April 1.
The ED had then seized cash of Rs 1.47 crore apart from gold jewellery and silver valued at Rs 67.64 lakh and a country-made revolver from some premises that were searched.
The probe stems from a Kolkata Police FIR against against Podder for his alleged involvement in rioting, attempt to murder, criminal conspiracy and Arms Act violations. The accused, including Podder, were engaged in organised criminal syndicate activities in the state of West Bengal and generated funds illegally by way of syndicate operations, the ED said in a statement on April 9.
Podder is also wanted by the police in a case of violence in Kankulia road near Golpark of Kolkata and is currently on the run.
The ED has issued summons to Podder but he has failed to join the investigation so far, according to the agency.
West Bengal will have a two phase poll on April 23 and April 29.
