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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Liquor worth over Rs 42 cr seized along Gujarat borders in two years, govt informs assembly
Ahmedabad (PTI): Liquor worth more than Rs 42 crore was seized from checkposts along Gujarat's borders with Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the past two years, the state government informed the assembly on Monday.
Gujarat is a dry state where prohibition is in force.
Replying to a question by Congress MLA Imran Khedawala, Gujarat Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi, who handles the Home portfolio, said 10,49,855 bottles of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) worth Rs 38.89 crore and 1,59,265 bottles of beer worth Rs 3.33 crore were seized in a two-year period ending January 25.
The seizures were made at checkposts located along the borders with Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, which are often used for smuggling liquor into Gujarat, Sanghavi said in his written reply, adding that 1,018 accused persons have been arrested so far and 141 are absconding.
Replying to a question raised by AAP MLA Gopal Italia, Sanghavi said more than 32,000 of cases have been registered against people found consuming liquor without permit in Ahmedabad and Vadodara districts over the past two years.
According to the data shared in the Assembly, 17,311 cases were registered against persons found consuming liquor without permit in Ahmedabad district, while 15,154 such cases were recorded in Vadodara district as of December 31, 2025.
The minister said the police have also taken various preventive measures against those supplying liquor to such consumers. These include increased patrolling in areas where people are repeatedly found consuming liquor, as well as prohibition drives conducted at the city, district and state levels.
Sanghavi said individuals frequently involved in illegal liquor activities are declared as "listed bootleggers", after which periodic raids are carried out against them.
If such persons continue to indulge in prohibition-related offences, strict measures such as cases under prohibition provisions, externment and action under Prevention of Anti-Social Activities (PASA) Act are initiated against them, he added.
Separate cases are also registered against those found supplying or manufacturing liquor illegally, Sanghavi told the assembly.
