Amazon Web Services outage leaves millions unable to access numerous platforms
Users around the world are unable to access their favourite platforms. The cause has been traced back to one tech giant.
Millions of users worldwide have been left unable to access some of the internet’s most popular platforms after a major outage struck multiple high-profile apps and websites.
Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Xero, Grammarly, Canva … the list goes on … were among the many services reporting significant problems, with frustrated users flocking to outage tracking website Down Detector to report issues.
The widespread disruption began around 6pm and appears to stem from technical problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech giant’s cloud computing division.
At 9pm AEDT, AWS confirmed global services that rely on its servers had “recovered” with most users able to access the affected platforms.
AWS acknowledged the issues on its service status page, stating it was experiencing “increased error rates” and delays affecting “multiple AWS services”.
In its latest update, at roughly 8pm AEDT, AWS said “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates”.
“We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” the AWS status page read.
“We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests.”
About half an hour later, AWS said there were “significant signs of recovery” but still classed its system status as “degraded”.
“Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information,” it said.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.
It later posted that the “underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated”.
“Most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” the company said.
One computer science expert says the likelihood of it being a cyberattack was slim.
The issue appears to be related to AWS (Amazon Web Services), which hosts the infrastructure that underpins much the internet services. It allows customers to deploy their own servers, databases, and storage without the need to own physical infrastructure,” Keele University’s Amro Al-Said Ahmad told The Guardian.
“According to AWS’s latest update, they have identified the root cause of the outage. It appears to be significant error rates for requests made to their data storage service, DynamoDB, in the US-EAST region. Therefore, the outage was not caused by cyber-related attacks, as was speculated.”
Amazon Web Services provides internet infrastructure services that allow companies to rent computers and servers to run their apps and websites, rather than maintaining their own physical hardware.
Amazon’s own Amazon.com, PrimeVideo and Alexa are all facing issues, according to Down Detector.
The scale of AWS’s reach means outages can have far-reaching consequences, affecting everything from social media platforms and gaming services to language learning apps and design tools.
Originally published as Amazon Web Services outage leaves millions unable to access numerous platforms
