Amazon Web Services outage takes a portion of the internet down with it

Amazon Web Services is currently having an outage, taking a chunk of the internet down with it.

Several AWS services were experiencing problems as of early Wednesday, according to its status page. That means any app, site or service that relies on AWS might also be down, too. (As I found out the hard way this morning when my Roomba refused to connect.)

Amazon says the issue is largely localized to North America. The company didn’t give a reason for the outage, only that it was experiencing increased error rates and that it was working on a resolution. The irony is that the outage is also affecting the company’s “ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard,” so not even Amazon is immune from its own downtime.

So far a number of companies that rely on AWS have tweeted out that they’re experiencing issues as a result, including Adobe and Roku.

We’ll keep you updated as this outage continues. On the bright side TechCrunch is still up, so here are a few things to read.

• Slack’s stock climbs on possible Salesforce acquisition
• Tiger Global invests in India’s Unacademy at $2 billion valuation
• Coinbase disables margin trading following guidance from Commodity Futures Trading Commission
• The FCC rejects ZTE’s petition to stop designating it a ‘national security threat’
• SpaceX successfully launches a Falcon 9 booster for a record seventh time
• Google plans to test end-to-end encryption in Android messages

Extra Crunch:

• Decrypted: Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud, Twitter hires Mudge, mysterious zero-days
• Dear Sophie: Can an H-1B co-founder own a Delaware C Corp?
• If you didn’t make $1B this week, you are not doing VC right
• As edtech grows cash rich, some lessons for early stage