Amazon Cloud Outage Disrupts Folens Irish Education Publisher Ring App and Popular Consumer Sites Globally

Folens, an Irish education publisher, reported disruptions to its ‘My Folens’ service stemming from a significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. The incident occurred on Monday, impacting numerous popular applications and platforms worldwide. AWS indicated that it had identified the issue and implemented a fix, noting early signs of recovery in its operations.
AWS Outage Impacting Global Services
The AWS outage primarily affected services in the United States but also caused disruptions across various sectors in Europe, particularly in Ireland. Notably, key applications including Fortnite, Snapchat, and several fintech platforms experienced outages.
Response from Affected Companies
- Folens: Acknowledged issues with its phone service linked to the AWS disruption.
- Ticketmaster Ireland: Confirmed resolution of earlier disruptions and encouraged users to retry purchases.
- Autodesk: Noted that some of its services across the EU were affected.
- Perplexity: The AI startup reported outages due to AWS issues.
- Coinbase and Robinhood: Both attributed their disruptions to AWS.
Extent of the Outage
The AWS outage is marked as the most significant disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike failure, which impacted critical services in hospitals, banks, and airports. The economic implications were felt across various industries due to reliance on AWS for computing power and data storage.
Widespread Platform Failures
In addition to Folens, numerous other platforms encountered issues, including:
- Duolingo
- Canva
- Ring
- Life360
- HMRC (UK tax authority)
- Major gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash of Clans
- Financial services like PayPal’s Venmo and Chime
- Lyft, an Uber competitor
Timeline of Events
Problems began around 8 a.m. local time, or midnight Pacific Time. Users reported connectivity issues within minutes, with major platforms voicing their grievances online. Despite the chaos, X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, continued functioning as usual.
Conclusion
The AWS outage underscores the vulnerabilities inherent in cloud service reliance. As companies recover, the resilience of these digital platforms will be in focus, with many aiming to prevent similar disruptions in the future.