Issues accessing various websites Tuesday Dec 7th
Throughout Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a partial outage in some of the east coast data centers that took down services for a majority of the east coast of the US. Most companies run services on AWS, this outage effected access to services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon.com, various airline mobile apps, Venmo, Instacart and a slew of other websites including banking and various mobile apps.
This also affected several vendors that UMBC partners with including our Virtual Desktop Solution, Respondus lockdown browser, certain pieces inside blackboard, and phone access to the Technology Support Center.
I've attached an article from the associated Press that goes into more detail.
At this point, Amazon believes they have mitigated a lot of the outage and are working to fully restore services.
If you are curious to check a particular site, there is a free service called https://downdetector.com/ That is crowd sourced where people can report outages. Its not perfect, but for a wide spread outage like this it can be a good checkpoint.
We will update if there are further developments, but hopefully the worst has passed with this outage.
Please let me know if you have any questions or would like more information,
Thank You,
Damian Doyle
Deputy CIO
DoIT - UMBC
Posted: December 7, 2021, 7:36 PM