Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Global Businesses and Popular Apps
Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps — Snapchat, Reddit and Fortnite — and disrupted businesses globally.
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The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.
After about eight hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 12:00 p.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services.
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Causes of the Outage
AWS was down for more than 7,800 users as of 11:46 a.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET.
“We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” AWS said in the latest update on its status page.
The issue, AWS said, originated from within the “EC2 internal network.”
EC2 refers to Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required.
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Affected Services and Businesses
While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal’s Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.
AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world’s largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud.
Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.
Impact on Global Businesses
According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.
Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Risks of Consolidation
Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.
Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances seen at around 7:00 a.m. ET.
Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.
Amazon’s own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.
Expert Analysis
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States.
In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.
AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
Conclusion
The AWS outage highlights the risks of consolidation in the cloud computing industry and the need for businesses to have backup plans in place. As the world becomes increasingly reliant on digital services, the impact of outages like this can be significant.
In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector’s UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website.
The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.
FAQs
What caused the AWS outage?
The root cause of the outage was an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of AWS’s network load balancers.
How many users were affected by the outage?
Over 7,800 users were affected by the outage, according to Downdetector.
What services were affected by the outage?
A wide range of services were affected, including Snapchat, Reddit, Fortnite, and Amazon’s own services such as its shopping website, Prime Video, and Alexa.
How long did the outage last?
The outage lasted for approximately eight hours, with some services coming back online after 12:00 p.m. ET (1400 GMT).
What can businesses do to prevent similar outages in the future?
Businesses can have backup plans in place, such as
