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Internet users around the world faced massive disruption on Monday morning due to an issue Amazon’s cloud computing service that shut down dozens of major online services, including social media sites snapchatroblox and Fortnite Video games and chat apps Signal,
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services Said that he is starting to recover from the problem.
Amazon Web Services provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities, and businesses, including the Associated Press, allowing them to provide online services.
On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported problems with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services. DownDetector said the problems were: “Possibly related to issues with Amazon Web Services.”
Coinbase and Signal both said on Twitter that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.
Even Amazon’s own services were not untouched by this. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren’t working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.
Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its Domain Name System, a device that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that websites and apps can load on Internet-connected devices.
The first sign of trouble 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 latency for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 region.”
Later, the company reported that there was a “significant error rate” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.
Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said it was seeing improvements in most of the affected services. “We can confirm that global services and features relying on US-EAST-1 have also been fixed,” it said, adding that it is working on a “full resolution.”
This is not the first time that issues with Amazon’s flagship services have caused widespread disruption. Several popular internet services shut down after a brief outage in 2023. The longest AWS outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies — ranging from airline reservations and auto 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 businesses and organizations.
“Much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) computing companies that provide the underlying infrastructure, so when an issue like this happens, it can be really impactful across a wide range of online services, a wide spectrum,” said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
“The world now runs on the cloud,” Burgess said, “and the Internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, because we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones.”
And because much of the plumbing of the online world is supported by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to figure out what’s going on because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
Burgess said, “The good news is that this type of issue is usually relatively quick (to resolve)” and there is no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident such as a cyberattack.
“This seems like a good old-fashioned technical problem, something went wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.
Amazon Web Services, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, which together provide most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, have “well-established procedures” for dealing with outages, Burgess said, adding that such outages are typically fixed in “hours rather than days.”
Amazon Web Services said around 6:30 a.m. Eastern time that “most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally.”