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Digital Blackout: AWS Outage Cripples KGW+ Streaming and Major Online Services

  • Nishadil
  • October 21, 2025
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Digital Blackout: AWS Outage Cripples KGW+ Streaming and Major Online Services

A significant disruption rippled through the digital world on December 7, 2021, as a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in its US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) brought down a vast array of online platforms, including KGW News's popular streaming service, KGW+.

The technical glitch, which began around noon Pacific Time, served as a stark reminder of our deep reliance on cloud infrastructure.

For hours, users attempting to access KGW's live broadcasts and on-demand content via KGW+ and other TEGNA streaming apps were met with frustrating error messages or buffering screens. This was not an isolated incident for local news, but a symptom of a much larger, cascading failure impacting some of the internet's biggest players.

The outage wasn't just confined to news and local media.

Giants of the entertainment industry such as Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ also reported widespread access issues, leaving millions of subscribers unable to stream their favorite shows and movies. Communication tools like Slack experienced connectivity problems, impeding workplace productivity, while even Amazon's own e-commerce operations felt the strain, with delivery updates and other internal systems encountering delays.

AWS, the dominant force in cloud computing, underpins a significant portion of the internet.

When a core region like US-EAST-1 experiences issues, the ripple effect is immediate and far-reaching. Websites, applications, and services that rely on AWS's servers for data storage, processing, and delivery can suddenly become inaccessible, causing widespread inconvenience and economic impact.

Throughout the day, KGW and other affected entities kept their audiences informed via social media, acknowledging the issue and assuring users that they were working to restore services.

By late afternoon and early evening, AWS reported that the primary issues had been resolved, and services gradually began to come back online. However, the event underscored the inherent vulnerabilities in a world increasingly dependent on centralized cloud providers.

This incident highlighted the importance of robust disaster recovery plans and the ongoing challenge of maintaining seamless digital experiences in an interconnected world where a single point of failure can disrupt countless lives and businesses.

While KGW+ and other services eventually returned, the December 2021 AWS outage served as a powerful lesson in the fragility of our digital ecosystem.

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