AWS Outage Downs ConnectWise Single Sign-On Function, BrightGauge

ConnectWise partners were blocked from signing on to many of the MSP management vendor’s products on Wednesday, including its BrightGauge business intelligence platform, after an Amazon Web Services outage hit server clusters on the east coast.

The company issued a workaround that resolved many of the problems, which impaced its Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities across several of its product lines, on Wednesday afternoon.

“Service has been restored for SSO-integrated products via an internal workaround,” the company said. “Users should now be able to once again access ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Control, ConnectWise Sell, ConnectWise Automate, ConnectWise University and Partner Insights,” ConnectWise said in a statement. “Some functionality within these products may still be impacted.”

ConnectWise was not alone in suffering problems related to the AWS outage. Companies such as Autodesk, Roku and Vonage, among others, attributed service disruptions to the outage.

ConnectWise products that continued to have problems Wednesday afternoon include ConnectWise Manage, which has issues with its calendar sync and escalation service; BrightGauge, where users are encountering 502 and 503 errors during login attempts; IT Boost, which has integration issues with other products; and ConnectWise Home, where some customers are still being denied access.

“We believe that the ConnectWise Single Sign On issue is related to the current AWS outage,” Tampa, Fla.-based ConnectWise said in its initial statement Wednesday morning. “Our teams are continuing to work to confirm the cause and find a resolution as soon as possible. Additionally, our support team is experiencing a high volume of chats and calls as a results of this issue. Partners may experience increased hold times. We apologize for the inconvenience and will continue to update you as we have more information.”

Seattle-based AWS said it was working on problems with four cloud regions in northern Virginia that started about 6:30 AM ET on Wednesday. The initial problem had to do with increased API error rates and failure rates in the “US-EAST-1” region.

ConnectWise partners in the Midwest and on the west coast confirmed that the problem impacted their ability to access some ConnectWise products.

“It does appear to be related to AWS,” said Zac Paulson, CEO of TrueIT an MSP in West Fargo, N.D. “We use ConnectWise for just about everything, so if it is down we have people sitting around twiddling their thumbs. It’s definitely not something that happens often. I’ve never seen BrightGauge not work.”

BrightGauge was also inaccessible for Mark Essayian, CEO of KME Systems, an MSP in Lake Forrest, Calif. He said KME put a support ticket in, and customer support responded that it appears to be linked to the AWS outage and that the ConnectWise team is working on the problem. While displays in his office that rely on BrightGauge are down, the outage has not hurt his operations.

“My Continuum [platform] is still working,” Essayian said.