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2 weeks ago
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Amazon Web Services said on Monday that it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” after issues with its cloud service operations disrupted hundreds of websites and apps for around three hours, including those for popular gaming and entertainment services.
The widespread internet disruption was the latest illustration of the fragility of the global technology infrastructure. It showed how a problem with a single piece of technology — especially one as widely used as Amazon’s services — can bring systems around the world to a halt.
The outages appeared to begin shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. Amazon said in its update at 5:27 a.m. that most services were back up and running. “We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” it said.
Amazon’s engineers had been working on limiting the effects of the issue and identifying the cause, the company said in an earlier statement. It added that 28 of its services, including those in the “US-EAST-1” region, were having issues.
The website DownDetector, which tracks internet outages, reported problems with dozens of major sites, including Amazon, Venmo, Hulu, McDonald’s and others.
Companies, including Coinbase, a cryptocurrency platform, reported problems during the outage and said the cause was Amazon Web Services.
“We’re aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage,” it said on X. “Our team is working on the issue and we’ll provide updates here. All funds are safe.”
The A.I. startup Perplexity said it was also experiencing an outage.
“The root cause is an AWS issue,” said Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of Perplexity. “We’re working on resolving it.”
Amazon Web Services said it was continuing to see recovery across most sites affected. “We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share,” it said in a statement.
An outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday took hundreds of services across the internet offline, demonstrating how the cloud service provider owned by Amazon makes the internet run smoothly.
Amazon Web Services grew out of the internal technology infrastructure that the internet retail giant built to support its diverse and often unconventional needs. That technology became very good at handling huge numbers of users doing complex, demanding, data-intensive operations, like streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of information.
Once the company realized it could effectively rent these and similar capabilities to other organizations, it invested much more in them and began pitching the service to other firms.
The list of online services and apps that were down on Monday — Coinbase, Zoom, Duolingo, Fortnight and several of the games at The New York Times — reflect just how ubiquitous Amazon Web Services has become in powering the internet. It is also used by banks and, health care and transportation companies.
Amazon’s cloud-computing division has infrastructure set up all around the world, allowing companies to make their products accessible to customers across the globe. By renting the service, customers can scale up or down without having to invest in otherwise costly hardware.
Some media advocates said that the outage, which caused disruptions to secure communications apps such as Signal and other digital tools, showed how the internet’s reliance on a few major technology companies created risks to free speech. “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing,” Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, said in a statement.
Amazon Web Services said the the severity of the incident has been “degraded.” It said that as problems begin to resolve, there may still be an additional lag. “Some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”
Disruptions across dozens of websites appear to be easing, according to DownDetector, which tracks internet outages. Numerous sites that had reported problems earlier on Monday were seeing fewer issues, including Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, the British government’s website and others.
Hundreds of websites and apps were reporting outages on Monday morning, causing a massive disruption across the internet.
Here’s a list of websites, apps and services that reported issues, according to the online outage tracker DownDetector.
Amazon
Venmo
Hulu
McDonald’s
Coinbase
Snapchat
Ring
Roblox
Zoom
Lloyd’s Bank
Bank of Scotland
Signal
Gov.uk
Wordle
Slack
Canva
Fortnite
Tidal
Duolingo
Microsoft365
PokemonGo
Coinbase
Strava
Whatsapp
Amazon Web Services said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” and that most services are back up. “We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” it said in an update.
Joel Petterson
The widespread internet disruption, apparently caused by issues at Amazon Web Services, was the latest illustration of the fragility of the global technology infrastructure. Monday’s disruption showed how a problem with a single piece of technology — especially one as widely used as Amazon’s cloud services — can bring systems around the world to halt, just like a faulty update by a little known cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike did in July 2024.
Lines at LaGuardia airport in New York are growing at airline check-in counters. Kiosks appeared to not work and apps were down. Airport security lines do not appear to be experiencing any technical difficulties.
Meredith Whittaker, the chief executive of Signal, the messaging app, said on X: “PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.”
