Amazon Web Services Outage Triggers Widespread IT Issues

ago 3 hours
Amazon Web Services Outage Triggers Widespread IT Issues

On Monday morning, users around the globe faced significant disruptions due to an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Numerous major online services experienced issues, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and the messaging app Signal. Approximately three hours into the outage, AWS confirmed progress toward resolution.

Affected Services and Impact

AWS underpins the cloud infrastructure for various government services, universities, and businesses, including the Associated Press. Users reported difficulties with additional services, such as Robinhood, the McDonald’s app, Coinbase, and even Amazon’s own Ring cameras and Alexa devices.

Details of the Outage

The disruptions began around 3:11 AM Eastern Time, when AWS reported increased error rates and latency for several of its services in the US-EAST-1 region. By 6 AM, the company announced that most affected services were recovering. It confirmed that global services relying on US-EAST-1 were also restored.

  • 3:11 AM: Initial reports of outages.
  • 6:00 AM: AWS reported most services were recovering.
  • 6:30 AM: AWS stated that operations were mostly normal.
  • 64: Number of internal AWS services impacted.

Causes and Historical Context

Amazon attributed the outage to issues related to its domain name system, which translates URLs into IP addresses for loading websites and apps. This incident is not unprecedented; previous outages have occurred, including a major one in late 2021 that lasted over five hours. AWS has faced downtime in 2020 and 2017 as well.

Industry Dependency on Major Tech Firms

Prominent cybersecurity expert Patrick Burgess from the UK highlighted the dependency on a small number of companies for cloud infrastructure. He noted that an issue like this can significantly affect various online services.

Despite the seriousness of such outages, Burgess mentioned that they are often resolved quickly and are not typically associated with cybersecurity incidents. He emphasized that AWS, along with competitors like Google and Microsoft, has established processes for addressing these problems efficiently.