Amazon’s server outage broke fast food apps like McDonald’s and Taco Bell

An outage within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud server setup was affecting a number of internet services, including our website, but has been resolved. The AWS Health Dashboard noted problems of degradation on multiple services in the US-East-1 region that started around 3PM ET.

The most recent update from Amazon that was posted at 6:42PM ET reads, “Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Our engineering teams were immediately engaged and began investigating. We quickly narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda… As of 3:37 PM, the backlog was fully processed. The issue has been resolved and all AWS Services are operating normally.”

Our own Mitchell Clark alerted us to the outage while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail because it seems to have busted Burger King’s mobile app. A peek at Downdetector shows people also reported issues with McDonald’s and Delta Air Lines, and the Taco Bell app was broken, too.

IT workers on Reddit and Hacker News reported they couldn’t access consoles to try to troubleshoot the issues they’re having.

For The Verge, the problems meant that the front page of the site isn’t updating automatically, but we found a workaround.

Update June 13th, 5:12PM ET: Added latest update from AWS and video explaining how much of the internet it hosts.

Update June 13th, 6:58PM ET: Updated to note the problem has been resolved.