Amazon stated that it cloud computing the service was recovering after a major shutdown it disrupted online activity around the world on Monday.
Amazon Web Services provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including the Associated Press.
On DownDetector, a website that monitors network outages, users reported problems with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald's app and many other services. Coinbase and Signal said on X that they were experiencing issues related to an AWS outage.
The first signs of trouble emerged around 3:11 a.m. ET, 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.”
The company later said that there had been a “significant number of bugs” and that engineers were “actively working” on the issue.
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Around 6 a.m. ET, the company said it was seeing restoration of most affected services. “We can confirm that global services and functions using US-EAST-1 have also been restored,” the company said, adding that it was working toward “full resolution.”
AWS customers include some of the world's largest companies and organizations.
“Most of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) computing companies to provide the underlying infrastructure, so when an issue like this happens it can have a really big impact on a wide range of online services,” said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at the UK's BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.
“The world now runs in the cloud,” and the Internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity since we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.
And because much of the work in the online world is supported by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it's very difficult for users to pinpoint what's going on because we don't see Amazon, we only see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
“The good news is that these types of problems tend to be resolved relatively quickly,” and there is no indication they were caused by a cyber incident, such as a cyber attack, Burgess said.
“It’s like a good old-fashioned technology problem: something went wrong and Amazon will fix it,” he said.
There are “well-established processes” for dealing with outages at Amazon Web Services and at rivals Google and Microsoft, which together provide much of the world's cloud computing infrastructure, Burgess said, adding that such outages are typically resolved in “hours, not days.”
At approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, Amazon Web Services reported that “most AWS Service operations are now progressing normally.”
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