Amazon Web Services outage disrupts Treez cannabis clients in AZ, CA

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Cannabis software provider Treez confirmed its retail point-of-sale software suffered a “partial service degradation,” affecting dozens of marijuana retail outlets in the Western United States.

Oakland, California-based Treez attributed the issue on Tuesday to a network outage at major cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to an email sent to clients and shared with MJBizDaily.

Reports about performance issues started coming in at about 11:05 a.m. PT, and service was restored by 1:45 p.m. PT, according to details posted on the Treez website.

Web service outage tracker Downdetector.com received hundreds of AWS outage reports on Tuesday.

In an interview with MJBizDaily, Treez CEO John Yang said the SellTreez software outage impacted roughly 100 cannabis retailers in Arizona and California.

Yang said the software has 99.9% uptime.

“Certainly we don’t want to have any outages whatsoever and further invest into redundancies when outages occur,” he said.

“The recovery time was prolonged, this time, due to (AWS) being down and affecting a number of other services, so that recovery and workarounds took a little longer.

“Therefore, we need to improve there, and we will improve there, and we will harden our services.”

Treez software powers roughly 40% of the California cannabis retail market in terms of gross merchandise value, according to Yang, as well as about 30% of the Arizona market and 20% of the Michigan market.

The privately held company raised $13 million in a 2020 investment round with Intrinsic Capital Partners.

In August, Treez announced it had been placed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private firms in the U.S.

– Solomon Israel