Amazon says a massive outage of its cloud computing service has been resolved as of Monday evening, after a problem disrupted internet use around the world, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
About three hours after the outage began early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it was starting to recover, but it wasn’t until 6 p.m. ET that “services returned to normal operations,” Amazon said on its AWS health website, where it tracks outages.
The company, which is Amazon’s cloud services unit, 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. The outage on Monday morning impacted social media apps like Snapchat and Reddit, and disrupted businesses around the world.
The company first flagged the issue around 3:10 a.m. ET. After roughly three hours of disruptions, systems were gradually coming back online as of 6 a.m. ET.
“We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues,” said an update posted around 10:30 a.m. ET on its status page.
“The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”
The company was still working to fully restore services as of 5:48 p.m. ET. It said in a previous update the issues were largely stemming from its US-EAST-1 Region.
Social, gaming, financial services affected
By 2:20 p.m. ET, outage tracking website Downdetector had received more than 13 million reports from users related to the incident, including more than 351,000 from Canada.
“The scale is very, very unique. And I suppose it points to the foundational role of AWS in the entire internet infrastructure and ecosystem,” said Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst with Ookla, the website’s parent company. “I would say for businesses, for companies, for policymakers, this is really a wake-up call.”
- Were you or your business affected by the Amazon Web Services outage? We want to hear from you. Send an email to ask@cbc.ca.
The Toronto Blue Jays said on X that Ticketmaster was experiencing ticket management issues due to the outage, and that the issues were being resolved. Just after 4:30 p.m. ET, the Blue Jays said on social media that the system was returning to normal.
Snapchat and Pinterest users were among those reporting issues to Downdetector on Monday. Amazon’s own shopping website, as well as its Prime Video service and Alexa chatbot, were also facing issues, according to the tracker.
Canadian investment company Wealthsimple confirmed to CBC News that it was affected by the outage. AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood also attributed their 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.
Workplace messaging app Slack said early on Monday morning that it was observing signs of recovery, but that issues were ongoing by 1 p.m. ET. Transcription software service Trint said it was also impacted by the outage.
Fortnite, 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.
Meredith Whittaker, president of messaging app Signal, confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were among the U.K.-based companies facing issues, according to Downdetector’s U.K. website. The website of the country’s tax, payments and customs authority, HMRC, was also 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.
“If we’re putting all of our eggs into so few baskets, [and] one of those baskets has a problem, it’s going to affect a lot of people — literally billions of people were impacted by this particular outage,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst based in London, Ont.
“This really is a reminder that the technology that we use every day is incredibly complex and that there are millions of tiny pieces of technology under the surface working together to keep all of this going, keep the lights on.”
The AWS outage is the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports around the world.
“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.
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.”
