Amazon says a massive outage of its cloud computing service was resolved Monday evening, after an issue disrupted internet use around the world, disrupting a wide range of online services including social networking, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
The daylong disruptions and the exasperation they have caused are the latest reminder that 21st-century society is increasingly dependent on a handful of companies for much of its Internet technology, which appears to work reliably until it suddenly fails.
About three hours after the outage began early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services said it was beginning to recover, but it wasn’t until 6 p.m. Eastern time that “services returned to normal operations,” Amazon said on its AWS health website, where it tracks outages.
Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said a “slow and bumpy recovery process” is “completely normal.”
Amazon attributed the outage to problems with its domain name system that converts web addresses to IP addresses, which are numerical designations identifying locations on the Internet. These addresses allow websites and applications to load on devices connected to the Internet.
Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it had received more than 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 businesses.
The Amazon division provides remote computing services to many applications, websites, governments, universities and businesses. Early Monday, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and more, according to Downdetector.
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.
By mid-morning, Amazon said it had started to recover, but as of around 1 p.m. ET, users were still reporting issues. Thousands of Venmo users reported difficulties around 1:30 p.m. ET, while people also reported problems with AI chatbot Claude, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon services like Alexa around the same time, according to Downdetector.
Some companies and applications posted on social media to alert their users that the AWS outage was affecting their services.
“An Amazon Web Services outage is impacting information in the Transit app. The duration of the disruption is currently unknown. We apologize for any inconvenience,” RTC Southern Nevada, the region’s transportation authority, said on X at 1:54 p.m. ET.
The outage also impacted the travel industry, with major airlines reporting issues.
A Southwest spokesperson said the outage affected the airline’s ability to efficiently schedule some early morning flights, while United said it disrupted customer access to the United app and website overnight. Delta said the problem caused a small number of minor delays Monday morning.
The country’s rail services have also been affected. Amtrak reported at 1:30 p.m. EDT that it was experiencing “intermittent technical difficulties” that were hampering text, email and push notifications, and preventing customers from booking through Amtrak.com or the mobile app.
“If you are traveling today, please arrive at your station at your usual time, typically 30 minutes before your train departs,” Amtrak said in a statement shared with CBS News.
How did it start?
Amazon first reported the outage issue at 3:11 a.m. ET. Shortly after, the company said its services in its eastern U.S. region were interrupted and its engineers were working to understand the cause of the problem. At 5:27 a.m. ET, AWS began reporting on progress, saying: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. »
A little over half an hour later, he said: “We continue to see a recovery in most” of the affected services.
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.
