The shares of e-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN) continued to trade near the flat line during pre-market on Monday, after a major outage from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud unit disrupted online services that relied on the company’s data centers in Northern Virginia.
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AWS’s US-East-1, the company’s largest cloud region in Northern Virginia, hosts dozens of its data centers. The downtime originating from the region has left several popular sites inaccessible, including social media platform Snapchat (SNAP), crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), and trading platform Robinhood (HOOD).
Amazon’s services, such as the shopping site Amazon.com, streaming platform Prime Video, and AI assistant Alexa, were also affected.
Amazon Studies Possible Cause of Outage
AWS, which confirmed the outage, said that a potential cause of the downtime could be the inability of its technology to translate the web address for DynamoDB — the company’s NoSQL database service — into an internet protocol (IP) address.
IP makes it possible for computers to find and connect to web addresses. Several apps through application programming interface endpoints rely on DynamoDB to run their online services. However, the outage resulted in “increased error rates and latencies,” according to Amazon.
AWS Initiates Service Recovery
Meanwhile, AWS has begun restoring access to its services, according to the unit’s latest update. This came after the company “applied initial mitigations.”
“We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” AWS noted. “We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
According to Downdetector, the outage also impacted several other sites, such as AI startup Perplexity, online gaming platform Roblox (RBLX), investment bank Goldman Sachs (GS), and London Stock Exchange Group’s (LSEG) data analytics provider Refinitiv.
Others affected include restaurant chain giant McDonald’s (MCD), ride-hailing service Lyft (LYFT), online streaming platform Roku (ROKU), and U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips (COP), among others.
Last week, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) streaming platform YouTube also suffered an outage that affected users globally, including those in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia.
Is Amazon a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, Amazon’s shares currently boast a Strong Buy consensus rating.
According to TipRanks, this is based on 43 Buys issued by analysts over the past three months. Moreover, the average AMZN price target of $267.82 indicates about 26% upside potential from the current level.
