NEW YORK (BN24) — Amazon’s cloud computing service was recovering from a major outage Monday that disrupted online activity around the world, affecting popular applications including Fortnite, Snapchat and Robinhood.
Amazon Web Services, which provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies including The Associated Press, reported it was seeing increased “error rates and latencies” for multiple services. “We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” the company said in its latest update.
The AWS outage represents the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction that hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports globally.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment but directed inquiries to its status page.
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed their outages to AWS problems. “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Amazon’s shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms that went down, while PayPal’s Venmo and Chime were among the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said.
Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the United States. Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker confirmed on X that the company’s platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
Britain’s Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector’s UK website. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website was also hit by the outage.
However, billionaire Elon Musk, owner of social media company X, said his platform continued to work. “X works,” he said, without commenting further.
The first signs of trouble emerged around three eleven in the morning Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
Later the company reported “significant error rates” and said engineers were “actively working” on the problem.
Around six in the morning Eastern Time, the company said it was seeing recovery across most of the affected services. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” it said, adding that it was working on a “full resolution.”
AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations. The widespread impact of the outage highlighted the vulnerability of modern digital infrastructure to disruptions at major cloud computing providers.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
The US-EAST-1 region referenced in AWS status updates is one of the company’s primary data center locations on the East Coast of the United States. Many companies rely on this region for critical services, making outages there particularly disruptive.
The incident underscored concerns about the concentration of internet infrastructure among a small number of major cloud providers. While cloud computing offers efficiency and scalability benefits, it also creates single points of failure that can affect millions of users simultaneously.
Companies affected by the outage scrambled to communicate with customers and implement contingency plans. Some were able to reroute traffic to backup systems, while others simply waited for AWS to restore services.
The outage affected diverse sectors including gaming, finance, e-commerce, communications and government services. The breadth of impact demonstrated how deeply integrated cloud computing has become in modern digital operations.
Financial technology companies were particularly affected, with users unable to access trading platforms and payment services during the disruption. Gaming platforms saw players disconnected from online matches and unable to access game servers.
AWS has experienced similar outages in the past, though they are relatively rare given the scale of operations. The company typically provides post-incident reports detailing root causes and remediation steps taken to prevent recurrence.
The recovery process for such outages can be complex, requiring careful coordination to restore services without causing additional disruptions. AWS engineers work to identify the root cause while simultaneously implementing fixes across affected systems.
As cloud computing continues to grow, questions about reliability and redundancy become increasingly important. Many experts recommend that critical services maintain backup infrastructure across multiple cloud providers to mitigate risks from single-provider outages.
Sources: AP/Reuters
