Amazon Web Services Inc. suffered what initially appeared to be a major cloud outage today that affected more than 240 online services, including major cloud customers such as Atlassian, Twilio and Slack.

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit even affected Amazon Alexa, rendering the company’s Echo devices temporarily mute.

“There was a loss of power to one of AWS’s redundant internet connection points in Virginia that created connectivity issues for a small number of AWS customers who are using Direct Connect services in AWS US East,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “AWS resolved the issue and is working with its partner to prevent recurrence.”

According to ThousandEyes Inc., a startup that monitors web and network performance, the outages began early this morning at an AWS data center in Ashburn, Virginia.

“Cascading effects rippled across the internet, even affecting companies who had contracted for direct, high-speed connections to AWS,” said Alex Henthorne-Iwane, vice president of product marketing at ThousandEyes. “This is what an act of nature looks like when it hits the internet. Many people don’t realize how much of the internet is driven by central hubs like this AWS datacenter. When they go down, the internet comes down with it. “

Today’s AWS outage could might fall under the “act of God” category, but that explanation may not be good enough for the company’s AWS Direct Connect customers, which pay a premium for what Amazon calls “a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.”

Amazon spent most of the day working to fixing the outage, and the company’s announcement that Direct Connect was “operating normally” came roughly eight hours after ThousandEyes said it first detected the problem. Outages are not common for AWS, but they are not unheard of either. The service suffered a major outage almost exactly one year ago, leaving hundreds of websites unavailable for roughly five hours.

Last year’s outage did not have much of an impact on Amazon’s share prize, and neither did today’s. In fact, Amazon’s shares steadily rose throughout the day. The company’s shares closed today about a half percentage point above their previous closing value.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE