Many major apps, websites affected due to Amazon Web Services shutdown
Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was recovering from a widespread outage on Monday that took down some of the world’s most popular apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, as well as thousands of websites and disrupted businesses globally.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and other digital services to companies, governments, and individuals. Disruptions to its servers could cause disruptions to websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
After about three hours of disruption, systems were slowly coming back online by 6 a.m. ET, with AWS saying it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some affected services.
“The majority of requests should now be successful. We continue to work through the backlog of queued requests,” it said in the latest update on the outage posted on its status page.
Amazon Web Services said in a previous update that the problems were largely originating from its US-East-1 region.
Gaming, financial services affected
Ookla, the owner of outage tracking website DownDetector, said more than 4 million users reported problems due to the incident.
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood blamed AWS for the outage.
“The confusion has been reduced for now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We are working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas said in a post on Xpress.
According to DownDetector, Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo, and Alexa were all experiencing issues.
Workplace messaging app Slack said it is “seeing signs of recovery, but some affected features may still experience failures.”
The outage tracking website said Epic Games-owned Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were shut down, while PayPal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues.
Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the US
Meredith Whittaker, president of messaging app Signal, also confirmed on X that their platform was also affected by the AWS outage.
In Britain, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecommunications service providers Vodafone and BT were also experiencing problems, according to DownDetector’s UK website. The website of the country’s tax, payment and customs authority HMRC was also affected by the problem.
AWS competes with cloud services from Google and Microsoft, the three of which account for about 63 percent of the cloud infrastructure market. AWS has long been the market share leader.
Experts and academics said the problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how dependent they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, a disruption that could wreak havoc on business and everyday life.
“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies are dependent on just one service,” said Nishant Shastri, director of research in the computer science department at the University of Surrey.
The AWS outage is the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike outage, which disrupted technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports globally.
