Amazon Web Services is back up after a brief morning outage

This is the third time that AWS has experienced a major outage this month.

Update, December 22, 9:00 a.m. ET: Amazon says the issue has been resolved

What you need to know

• Amazon Web Services is experiencing another outage.
• The latest outage appears to be limited to the U.S. East Coast.
• Some of the services impacted by the outage include Fortnite, Hulu, Quora, Slack, and Imgur.

Amazon Web Services appears to have gone down for the third time this month. The latest outage is causing networking connectivity issues for some users on the U.S. East Coast. As per data from DownDetector, the outage has affected a number of popular services including Hulu, Coinbase, Imgur, and Slack. Amazon says the outage was caused by a "loss of power within a single data center" in the U.S. East Coast region.

Amazon Web Services posted the following update on its service health dashboard at 8:01 AM ET:

We can confirm a loss of power within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. This is affecting availability and connectivity to EC2 instances that are part of the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone.

We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone, or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center.

Amazon Web Services experienced a nearly six-hour-long outage on December 7. The outage affected various popular services that rely on the cloud system — including Disney+, Prime Video, Amazon Alexa, Netflix, and payments app Venmo. Just eight days later, AWS went down again, affecting services like Twitch, Xbox Live, and DoorDash.

Update (9:00 a.m. ET) ― AWS is now back to normal

Amazon Web Services issued a new update at 8:39 AM ET, confirming that power has been restored to "all instances and network devices within the affected data center." All services that were affected by the brief outage should now be back to normal.