Major AWS outage disrupts apps and services worldwide

Major AWS outage disrupts apps and services worldwide

Network connectivity issues in AWS’ US-EAST-1 facility have caused widespread outages affecting thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally.



The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.

The problems had spanned eight hours at the time of writing and are attributed to networking issues in AWS’ US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia.

Initially attributed to a DNS issue affecting the DynamoDB service, which AWS said it had resolved, the problems have since expanded to other cloud services including EC2, relational database service, and elastic container service.

We have confirmed multiple AWS services experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said in its most recent status updates.

“We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network. We continue to investigate and identify mitigations.”

Asked for comment on the outage, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and Fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the issue appeared to be with one of the networking systems AWS uses to control a database product.

“As this issue can usually be resolved centrally … unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours,” he said.

Ookla, owner of outage tracking website Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.

Issues on some apps and websites, including Snapchat, Roblox, streaming site Max and PayPal’s Venmo were showing signs of easing, according to Downdetector.

Other services, however, remained affected, with thousands of reports for social media app Reddit and financial platform Chime on Downdetector.

AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.

Amazon’s own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.

Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected.

Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States.

In a post on X, Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.

Outage exposes dependency risks

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.

“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,” said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Research at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science.



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