An Amazon Web Services outage on Oct. 20 temporarily disrupted operations at Boston-based Tufts Medicine.
The outage, now resolved, also knocked out several major websites and apps — including Snapchat, Facebook and Fortnite — CNN reported Oct. 21.
Amazon said the outage began in its Northern Virginia data center region due to problems with the system that manages web address lookups for one of its main databases. The issue caused a chain reaction that affected several Amazon services, including EC2, Lambda and CloudWatch, before being fully resolved later that afternoon, according to the AWS status page.
Tufts Medicine, which in 2022 became one of the first health systems to migrate its entire digital healthcare ecosystem, including its Epic EHR, to AWS, experienced slowdowns across several platforms.
“While at no point was clinical care compromised, the recent Amazon Web Services outage affected several of Tufts Medicine’s platforms, causing slowdowns in our IT systems and minor delays in processing lab results,” a health system spokesperson told Becker’s in an emailed statement.
While Tufts reported slowdowns, other Epic-in-the-cloud health systems remained unaffected.
Memphis, Tenn.-based Baptist Memorial Health Care, which also hosts its Epic EHR on Amazon’s cloud, reported no disruptions during the outage.
“The programs Baptist Technology Services directly manages — including Epic in the AWS cloud — have not been affected,” a Baptist Memorial spokesperson told Becker’s in an emailed statement.
Montefiore Health System in New York City likewise reported no service interruptions, a spokesperson for the health system confirmed to Becker’s. In February, the health system announced plans to transition most of its technology portfolio — including its Epic EHR — to Amazon Web Services’ cloud.
