Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was recovering Monday from a widespread outage that took down thousands of websites, as well as some of the world's most popular apps including Snapchat and Reddit, and disrupted businesses around the world.
AWS provides businesses, governments, and individuals with computing power, data storage, and other digital services on demand. Server failures can disrupt websites and platforms that rely on cloud infrastructure.
After about three hours of outages, systems gradually returned to service at 6 a.m. ET, with AWS saying it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some affected services.
“Most requests should now be successful. We continue to work through a backlog of requests,” reads the latest outage message posted on the status page.
In a previous update, Amazon Web Services said the issues were primarily in the US-EAST-1 region.
Games and financial services affected
Ookla, owner of crash tracking website Downdetector, said more than 4 million users reported problems related to the incident.
Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood blamed the outages on AWS.
“Perplexity is not working right now. The main reason is an issue with AWS. We are working on a solution,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Shopping sites Amazon, PrimeVideo and Alexa are facing problems, according to Downdetector.
Workplace messaging app Slack said it was “seeing signs of recovery, but some affected features may still experience outages.”
Epic Games-owned Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were taken offline, while Venmo and Chime Paypal were among the financial platforms that faced problems, the outage tracking site reported.
Uber rival Lyft's app was also unavailable for thousands of users in the US.
Messaging app Signal President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was also affected by the AWS outage.
In the UK, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecoms providers Vodafone and BT are also facing problems, according to UK website DownDetecor. The website of the country's tax, payments and customs authority HMRC was also affected by the outage.
AWS competes with cloud services from Google and Microsoft, with the three companies holding about 63 percent of the cloud infrastructure market. AWS has long been a market leader.
The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they are now on a small number of global cloud providers, with a single failure causing havoc in business and everyday life, experts and scientists say.
“The main reason for this problem is that all these large companies relied on just one service,” said Nishant Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science.
The AWS outage is the first major internet outage since last year's CrowdStrike outage, which paralyzed technology systems at hospitals, banks and airports around the world.
