You might have experienced some trouble with your Ring security cameras and doorbells on Monday evening. This was due to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) issue in the US-EAST-1 region, which supports many internet services. The problem caused an outage affecting Amazon-owned Ring, leaving many users unable to access features like history, events, and neighbours.
Ring services affected by the outage
The trouble began on Tuesday at 6:40 PM ET. Ring reported issues with multiple systems, impacting Live View, Recordings, Timeline, and Event History. As a result, your Ring device wasn't functioning as expected during this time.
Ring updated its status page at 1:20 AM ET to announce that the issue had been resolved. They detailed that the problems had affected Ring.com, Ring Protect (video recording), live calls (doorbell dings and motions), video on demand, and partner integration. This meant that if you were trying to review past events or receive notifications, you likely faced some disruptions.
AWS explains the cause of the problem
By 9:00 PM ET on Tuesday, the AWS Health dashboard provided more details on what had caused the issues. They explained that starting at 2:45 PM PDT, a subsystem within Kinesis began experiencing increased contention when processing incoming data. Although this had a limited impact on most customer workloads, it did cause some internal AWS services like CloudWatch, ECS Fargate, and API Gateway to experience downstream effects. This meant that services you rely on for real-time updates and recordings were temporarily down.
According to the AWS Health dashboard, around 64 AWS services were affected. Amazon assured users the issues were “resolved and all services operate normally.” However, they noted that some impacted metrics and logs might be delayed until entirely backfilled. This could mean you might experience some lag in your logs and metrics data for a short period of time.
Impact on users
If you rely on Ring for your home security, these disruptions are likely to cause some inconvenience. The features you depend on for monitoring your property were only available for some time. The outage highlights how dependent many devices and services are on AWS infrastructure.
The resolution came early on Wednesday morning, but the impact reminds us of the interconnected nature of internet services. As AWS supports a vast array of services and platforms, an issue in one area can have widespread effects.
Amazon and Ring have confirmed that the issues have been resolved and all services should return to normal. If you are still experiencing problems with your Ring device, it is recommended to check the status page for updates or contact Ring support for assistance.
For now, you can rest assured that your Ring cameras and doorbells will function properly, and you will have access to all the usual features without any issues.
