AWS outage affects services like Alexa, Slack and BitBucket – update

Amazon Web Services experienced a disruption on Friday evening, affecting several other service providers. For example, Amazon’s own Alexa service is not available and, for example, Slack and BitBucket are experiencing problems.

On its AWS status page, Amazon reports that the issues are in North America and related to its Direct Connect service. This makes it possible for companies to set up a connection between their own data center and the AWS servers. The company reports that it is working on a fix and that some connections are down.

The Verge writes that due to the problems, the Alexa voice assistant no longer functions on various devices. After asking a question, the assistant indicates that no connection is possible. Other services also seem to have problems. Atlassian service BitBucket reports that the problems are now easing again and that they were the result of problems with AWS.

Communications service Slack writes on its status page that there are reports that its service is unreachable. The company blames this on problems with ‘an upstream provider’. GitHub also experienced problems on Friday, but has since recovered.

Update, 20:44: Shortly after publishing this post, Slack reported no more issues.