APPS AND BANKS AMONG THOSE HIT
While Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, other apps like Snapchat, PayPal’s Venmo, and Duolingo, were still reporting issues. Amazon’s own platforms, including its shopping website, Prime Video, and Alexa, were also hit, though some improvement was noted later in the day.
Gaming and financial platforms were also affected, including Fortnite, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, and trading apps Coinbase and Robinhood, all of which attributed disruptions to AWS. Uber rival Lyft also experienced downtime in the United States.
In Britain, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the UK tax and payments authority HMRC were hit, according to Downdetector’s UK tracker.
EXPERTS WARN OF “FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES”
Experts said the outage highlighted the global dependency on a few large cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It further highlights that one failure can cripple vast portions of the digital economy.
“This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” said Jake Moore, cybersecurity advisor at ESET.
Nishanth Sastry of the University of Surrey said many major firms had “relied on just one service,” leaving them vulnerable to cascading failures.
Although AWS has not suggested a cyberattack, analysts said the scale of the outage has fuelled speculation.
“When anything like this happens, the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos.
“AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset.”
