AWS experienced an outage in North America Wednesday that affected many sites and services including Roku, Flickr, Adobe, and others

The Verge 2020-11-27 Jay Peters

Context & Ripple Effects

This is the first entry in what becomes a pattern: AWS outages repeatedly taking down swaths of the consumer internet, with Roku appearing as a casualty again in a December 2021 outage that also hit Disney+, Tinder, Coinbase, and Venmo. The 2020 incident also echoes the Fastly CDN failure months earlier, where Amazon's own sites went down alongside BBC, NYT, and Spotify — different vendor, same single point of failure.

First-order effects

Users of Roku, Flickr, Adobe, and other AWS-dependent services lose access to those products for the duration of the North America disruption, with no workaround since the dependency sits below each company's control.

Second-order effects

AWS customers burned by repeat incidents — Roku among them — face pressure to invest in multi-region or multi-cloud redundancy, raising their infrastructure costs precisely because AWS's scale made single-provider reliance economical.

Third-order effects

The recurrence — including a nearly four-hour US-EAST-1 outage in 2023 and another US-EAST-1 failure in October 2025 — points toward cloud concentration becoming a recognized systemic risk, pushing architecture norms toward geographic distribution and drawing potential regulatory attention to single-provider dependencies.

The trend: Recurring AWS outages, concentrated in the US-EAST-1 region, are turning single-cloud dependence on one provider into a structural fragility for the consumer internet.

Discussion

@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
Welcome to the future https://twitter.com/...
@adobespark Adobe Spark on x
An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting Adobe Spark so you may be having issues accessing/editing your projects. We are actively working with AWS and will report when the issue has subsided. https://status.adobe.com/ for current Spark status. We apologize for any inconvenienc…
@nyctsubway @nyctsubway on x
Hello. We are currently unable to remove the A line service alert from our website and app because of the widespread Amazon AWS outage. A trains are no longer running local in Brooklyn. We will continue to post updates here as we have them.
@irobot @irobot on x
An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App. Please know that our team is aware and monitoring the situation and hope to get the App back online soon. Thank you for your understanding and patience.
@rokusupport @rokusupport on x
@ProgRok We are working to resolve this quickly. We are impacted by the widespread AWS outage and hope to get our customers up and running soon. Most streaming should work as expected during this time.
@realsaidov @realsaidov on x
Earlier today, we saw a dip in chain density. This might explain why. NOTE: The stakeholders of #SKY and #SKY2 are protected against AWS failures — one of many advantages of high performance, bare-metal servers. 😎 #Cardano $ADA https://techcrunch.com/...
@mattocko Matt Ocko on x
The “cloud” only works for true life or death apps w/ 6 “nines” true uptime (not an avg.) — imagine hearing “sorry, can't analyze your spouse's aneurysm for a few hours” 😳 W/ multiple annual outages ea, MSFT, AWS, Goog have a *long* way to go https://techcrunch.com/...
@flickrhelp @flickrhelp on x
[status] Identified: Members are receiving an “Oops, something went wrong” error when trying to log in or create an account due to a current AWS outage. We are monitoring the situation and will continue to share information here as it... https://stspg.io/...
@tomwarren Tom Warren on x
you really get a sense for how Amazon is winning the cloud war when an AWS outage hits. Huge parts of the internet dropped offline due to AWS issues yesterday, but we rarely see the same when Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have outages https://www.theverge.com/...
@jacob_posts Jacob on x
people connect their vacuums and doorbells to the internet? https://twitter.com/...
@geoffbelknap Geoff Belknap on x
I... can't vacuum... because us-east-1 is down.
@blackamazon @blackamazon on x
The way I like my unconnected practical ass shit https://twitter.com/...
@martinfowler Martin Fowler on x
My younger self did not have “bookstore's data center causes widespread failures in vacuum cleaners” on his list of future events. https://twitter.com/...
@drandrewthaler Andrew Thaler on x
It's like when Tesla's app went down and folks were completely stranded because their cars wouldn't start. https://twitter.com/...
@drandrewthaler Andrew Thaler on x
Holy Mola. AWS took down parts of the NYC subway. https://twitter.com/...
@ealshafei @ealshafei on x
We have to decentralize the web and its core infrastructure. Responsibility over profit. https://techcrunch.com/...
@pocket @pocket on x
@b_t_walsh Hi Blake. Yes, we are indeed down due to the current AWS issues. Our team is working hard to bring our site back online ASAP. We'll also be sure to pause our article recommendations until we're back. Thanks for your patience! https://twitter.com/...
@rss @rss on x
@RSS is one of the companies affected by the AWS system outage. Login and uploads not processing. Delivery and distribution of all episodes are unaffected. Public podcast pages are also available. New uploads will resume as soon as the issue is resolved.
@cmastication JD Long on x
When those “Realistic Disaster Scenarios” start getting real... https://twitter.com/...
@jcstearns Josh Stearns on x
Amazon Web Services went down today and took Capital Gazette, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tampa Bay Times, The Washington Post, and WNYC with it. https://www.theverge.com/... via @Verge
@zackwhittaker Zack Whittaker on x
Amazon closed 2% up after a day-long (and still going) AWS outage that took down a good chunk of the internet with it. AWS accounts for more than half of Amazon's operating profits. https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@cloudexpo @cloudexpo on x
AWS outage kills Black Friday sales for many Amazon merchants, causing billions of dollars in lost revenue https://techcrunch.com/...
@gum_mp3 @gum_mp3 on x
that's what u get for buying surveillance state tech on purpose https://twitter.com/...
@stevesilberman Steve Silberman on x
The Internet of Things That Don't Work. https://twitter.com/...
@damon_talbot Damon Talbot on x
Can't clean the house for Thanksgiving because the vacuum can't connect to the internet.... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@alicegoldfuss Mechanical Turkey on x
Can't wait to read the AWS outage write-up where we once again learn that sometimes humans touch computers
@jaypeters @jaypeters on x
Some companies I've seen reporting issues due to the AWS outage: Adobe Spark, Anchor, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, Tampa Bay Times, and Vonage. A lot of places rely on AWS!
@jaypeters @jaypeters on x
AWS' outage has been going on for at least a couple of hours. The AWS status page ( https://status.aws.amazon.com/) says that “for the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region” it has identified the cause and is working on a fix. https://www.theverge.c…
@quinnypig Corey Quinn on x
With the AWS outage ongoing, how will they manage to dump all of the service enhancements / announcements that they've been holding back all year but weren't important enough for the keynote?
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
How much should I read into the fact that we rarely write about Azure or Google Cloud outages knocking out swaths of the internet? https://www.theverge.com/...
@zephyrteachout Zephyr Teachout on x
Brilliant industrial policy on Clinton/Bush/Obama's part. Centralize points of failure. https://twitter.com/...
@dhh @dhh on x
Maybe running half the internet off the same cloud service wasn't such a great idea after all 😬 https://www.theverge.com/...
@ericajoy Erica Joy on x
before i opened this article i was like “i am betting us-east-1.” nailed it. https://twitter.com/...
@zackwhittaker Zack Whittaker on x
And a good portion of the internet, it seems. https://techcrunch.com/...

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