Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was recovering on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps — including Snapchat and Reddit — 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 can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
After roughly three hours of disruptions, systems were gradually coming back online as of 6 a.m. ET, with AWS saying it was making progress on resolving the issue.
“We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and are continuing to investigate the root cause,” it said in an update posted around 10:30 a.m. ET on its status page.
Amazon Web Services said in a previous update the issues were largely stemming from its US-EAST-1 Region.
Gaming, financial services affected
Ookla, owner of outage tracking website Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.
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AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector.
Workplace messaging app Slack said it was “observing signs of recovery, but some impacted features may still encounter failures.”
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said.
Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the U.S.
Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to DownDetector’s U.K. website. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website too was hit by the outage.
Just 3 cloud companies dominate market
AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services, with the three comprising about 63 per cent of the cloud infrastructures market. AWS has long been the market share leader.
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.
“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,” said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey’s department of computer science.
The AWS outage is the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction that hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports globally.
“The world now runs on the cloud,” said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
The internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, he added.
And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening, because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
While there has been no indication yet of a potential cyberattack behind Monday’s outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation.
“When anything like this happens, the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos.
“AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset.”
