The Amazon Web outage has wreaked havoc on the e-commerce giant’s delivery process, preventing drivers from obtaining delivery information and cutting off communication between Amazon and the thousands of drivers it depends on, according to four sources familiar with the situation.
Three delivery partners said the Amazon.com Inc app used to communicate with delivery drivers is down. Another source said that the trucks that were supposed to be on the way to deliver the packages stopped working without a call from the company. Another source added, “Amazon Flex” independent delivery drivers who carry packages in their own cars cannot log into the Amazon app to get assignments.
Amazon and its cloud services division suffered widespread outages on Tuesday.
DownDetector, which monitors Internet connectivity, detected more than 20,000 complaints from Amazon, and more than 11,000 from Amazon Web Services, at about 12:10 p.m. in New York. Several popular sites, including Coinbase, Robinhood and Netflix, have also run into problems, according to Downdetector.
Amazon Web Services said it has identified the cause of the “increased error rates” and is working to fix it. At the same time, the company is directing customers to alternative servers in its western region that does not experience the increasing bug problems in eastern North America.
Several Amazon cloud computing services have been affected, including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute.
Amazon declined to comment and directed users to the Amazon Web Services dashboard.
The problems come in the midst of the Amazon shopping season, and the company may not be able to handle delays that could lead to permanent crowding. One West Coast delivery business owner said the company halted deliveries on Tuesday and plans to reassemble itself on Wednesday.
Two delivery partners in previous time zones said drivers who already had multiple routes were instructed to put their phones on airplane mode and not log out of Amazon’s routing app until they could continue to stop, but drivers who weren’t assigned Paths to them have already been marginalized.
Amazon Web Services; A cloud computing provider, selling to businesses on-demand computing software services rather than maintaining data centers and their in-house teams. Customers also include a wide range of industries and the federal government. If it is not fixed quickly; Amazon Web Services problems can escalate quickly.
