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Amazon Web Services outage interrupts some major websites

The Tuesday AWS outage brought down some businesses' websites. Amazon later said service had been 'fully restored.'
People stand in the lobby for the Amazon offices in New York.
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On Tuesday an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused disruptions across a number of major businesses' websites, rendering some temporarily inoperable. 

At issue was an aspect of AWS called "Lambda" which allows users to run code for a list of applications.

Lambda lets customers run programs without having to manage underlying servers. 

Reports of issues with websites not working properly, or users receiving error prompts, came through for hours. 

Amazon posted a message to its AWS status page informing users it had been able to restore much of its service and said later that the AWS system and services were "fully recovered."

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Amazon said it would continue to work to fix other issues and parts of the service that weren't operating properly. 

Companies have reportedly been recently pulling out of the AWS service for various reasons, including as a cost cutting measure. 

It was unclear how widespread the issues with the service were by mid-afternoon on Tuesday. The problems were revealed just as news organizations were in the middle of breaking coverage of Donald Trump's indictment and his arraignment at a federal court in Miami, Florida. 

The Associated Press reported that its service had been affected by the AWS outage, as clients of the AP experienced trouble accessing its webportal. Other outlets reported having issues as well. Reports given to Downdetector showed that a huge spike in issues happened just after 2 p.m. ET. The company said that by Tuesday evening AWS was "operating normally."