NJ MVC on the list impacted by Amazon Web Services outage

Some phone service at the state Motor Vehicle Commission was affected Tuesday by a widescale Amazon Web Services outage.

Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services to a wide array of companies as well as individuals, universities and governments, said it had identified the "root cause" of problems early Tuesday afternoon, which rendered many sites and apps useless.

The NJ MVC said that the biggest impact of the problem was its call-back function. No other state agencies were reporting issues.

AWS said it was “actively working towards recovery," according to a report by the Associated Press which said it is also affected by the outage.

The outage began mid-morning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm... “AWS is the biggest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts to many popular websites and other internet services,” he said.

People trying to use such apps and services as Venmo, Instacart, Roku and Disney+ had reported issues.

The website downdetector.com was also getting reports about issues with Amazon devices including Alexa, Kindle, and Ring, as well as Uber Eats.

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Contact reporter Dan Alexander at Dan.Alexander@townsquaremedia.com or via Twitter @DanAlexanderNJ