The outage that Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced yesterday also had an impact on contact centers, as the CCaaS solution Amazon Connect was also affected.

 

The source of the problems was in AWS's US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia), a location that had previously experienced major disruptions in 2020 and 2021It is also AWS's oldest data center.

For more than six hours, various services experienced errors and connectivity issues, including AWS Connect.

Outage monitor Downdetector received over 4 million reports of problems worldwide due to the outage. Popular apps like Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, and Duolingo went offline, as did parts of banking and government services. Companies like McDonald's, DisneyPlus, and Coinbase also experienced problems. Even Amazon.com was offline at one point, and some users reported that their Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells stopped working. AWS is the world's largest cloud services provider.

Amazon Connect Issues

In the status updates on the AWS Health Dashboard AWS explicitly stated that the network issues affected services such as Hit Amazon Connect in US-EAST-1.

Customers could experience localized delays or increased latency well into the day. These issues resulted in delayed queue processing in SQS, intermittent read/write errors for DynamoDB clients, and disrupted or dropped contact flows in Amazon Connect. As a result, affected applications experiencing issues reading and writing data, processing background tasks, or handling contact center calls experienced slow performance or even crashes.

Several organizations in the Netherlands have also been affected to varying degrees by the AWS outage, including bol.com, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, NS (Dutch Railways), KPN, and Picnic. The LUMC reported that check-in kiosks were down. Abroad, companies such as BT, Twilio, Zoom Contact Center, Lloyds Bank and HMRC are affected by the customer contact process. At travel management platform Navan Customer service was largely down. No information is yet available about disruptions to Dutch customer service operations.

(zip tone)

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