AWS outage impacting Amazon and other services for thousands of users

Several Amazon.com Inc services, including Prime Video, its namesake e-commerce website and applications that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) were down for thousands of users around the world on Tuesday.

Amazon said the outage was likely due to issues related to the application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

"We are experiencing API and console issues in the U.S.-East-1 region," Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard.

It said it had identified the cause and was working to resolve the issue.

The effect is not limited to the U.S., however. The tracking website DownDetector says there are almost 2,000 reports from Canadians of online services being down on Tuesday. In the U.S., there are 24,000 such reports.

Amazon services such as Prime and its streaming platform have been impacted, but so are other services that use AWS servers to run, including Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, according to their social media pages.

Ring said it was aware of the issue and working to resolve it.

"A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App," iRobot said on its website.

In June, websites, including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times, were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based content delivery network provider Fastly Inc, a smaller rival of AWS.

In July, Amazon experienced a disruption in its online-store service, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected more than 38,000 users.