Internet services cut for hours by Amazon cloud outage
Crypto exchange Coinbase, as well as games Fortnite and Roblox, were among those affected
MANY popular Internet services, from streaming platforms to messaging services and some banks, went offline for hours on Monday (Oct 20) due to an outage in Amazon’s crucial cloud network.
The disruption affected streaming platforms, including Amazon’s Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat and Duolingo.
Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and Whatsapp were also affected in Europe, according to Downdetector, a website monitoring Internet problems.
Ookla, owner of Downdetector, said more than four million users reported issues due to the incident.
Some UK banks, such as Lloyd’s, were also impacted, and pointed to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the problem.
AWS handles nearly one-third of the planet’s cloud infrastructure market, powering millions of apps and websites around the world.
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AWS’ maintenance site said its engineers scrambled to fix the underlying DNS issue once they became aware at 0711 GMT of “increased error rates” hitting multiple services.
More than four hours later, though some problems persisted, AWS said it was on the path “towards full recovery” and most of its operations were “succeeding normally”.
Issues on some apps and websites, including Snapchat, Roblox, streaming site Max and PayPal’s Venmo were showing signs of easing, according to Downdetector.
Snapchat last had over 4,000 reports, down from an earlier peak of more than 22,000, while reports on Roblox dropped to less than 500 from a peak of over 12,600.
Other services, however, remained affected, with thousands of reports for social media app Reddit and financial platform Chime on Downdetector.
Artificial intelligence 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.
Cloud leader
Financial analyst Michael Hewson said the outage showed “how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet, for many of the online services we more or less take for granted”.
“On an economic level it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.”
AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft Azure, and with Google Cloud in third place. Businesses, government and consumers around the world rely on their infrastructure for online activities.
The British government’s websites were among those affected by Monday’s outage, according to Downdetector, which relies on users to signal online problems they encounter.
AWS said the problem appeared to have originated in one of its critical infrastructure zones: the US-East-1 region, located in the US state of Virginia.
The issue identified has to do with the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol used on the Internet to associate information with various domain names.
Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyberexpert 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.
AWS said that although the DNS problem was “fully mitigated” at 1030 GMT, it caused a huge backlog of stymied requests that had to be worked through.
Independent cyberanalyst Rimesh Patel, quoted by the Science Media Centre, a UK charity focused on science and engineering, said: “This major online outage underscores a stark reality: Business operations associated with one critical vendor in a region can cascade into global instability.”
Alan Woodward, a University of Surrey professor quoted by the same centre, said: “It highlights how interdependent our digital infrastructure has become.”
In July 2024, another global online outage occurred when a US cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, issued a faulty update to its software used by airports, hospitals and many organisations.
According to Microsoft, some 8.5 million devices were affected, resulting in a systems crash and users being confronted with a “blue screen of death”.
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