Amazon outage disrupts global online services

LONDON (AP) — Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption Monday due to a problem with Amazon’s cloud computing service that led to the shutdown of dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, video games Roblox and Fortnite and chat app Signal.

About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said this was the case. I’m starting to get over the problem.

Amazon Web Services provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press, that allows them to provide online services.

On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users have reported problems with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services. DownDetector said the issues were: “Possibly related to issues with Amazon Web Services. »

Coinbase and Signal both said on X that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.

Even Amazon’s services were not immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported on DownDetector that they weren’t working, while others said they couldn’t access Amazon’s website or download books to their Kindle.

Amazon blamed the outage on problems with its domain name system, a device that converts web addresses to IP addresses so that websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.

The first signs of problems emerged around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its health dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region.”

The company later reported that there were “significant error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.

Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said it was seeing a recovery in most affected services. “We can confirm that global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” it said, adding that it was working on a “full resolution.”

This is not the first time that issues with key Amazon services have caused widespread disruption. Many popular internet services were down after a brief breakdown in 2023. The longest AWS outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when businesses – from airline reservations and car dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services – were affected for more than five hours. Outages also occurred in 2020 and 2017.

The company reported that 64 internal AWS services were affected by the issue.

AWS customers include some of the world’s largest companies and organizations.

“A lot of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) computing companies that provide the underlying infrastructure that, when a problem like this occurs, can have a real impact on a wide range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, the UK-based Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud” and the internet is considered a utility like water or electricity because we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.

And because much of the plumbing of the online world relies on a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to determine what’s going on because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.

“The good news is that this type of problem is usually relatively quick (to resolve)” and there is no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident such as a cyber attack, Burgess said.

“It looks like a good old technology problem, something is wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.

There are “well-established processes” for handling outages at Amazon Web Services, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, which together provide most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, Burgess said, adding that such outages are typically resolved within “hours rather than days.”

Amazon Web Services said around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time that “most AWS service operations are now successful.”