A global outage hit Amazon’s cloud services for several hours on Monday (Oct 20), the subsidiary of the US tech giant said, disrupting many websites and services, including Amazon Prime, Perplexity, Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat and Duolingo.
The maintenance site for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it took some three hours for engineers to largely fix the problem, which they first noticed when “increased error rates” hit multiple services.
By 1035 GMT (6.35pm, Singapore time), the issue had been corrected “and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now”, it said. Some services, though, continued to be disrupted.
During the outage, many other online services were affected, according to Downdetector, a website monitoring internet problems. They included Reddit, various video streaming platforms such as Hulu and Disney+, as well as messaging app Signal and Delta Air Lines.
AWS said the problem appeared to originate in a critical AWS infrastructure zone, the US-East-1 region, located in the northern part of the US state of Virginia.
The outage showed “how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted,” said financial analyst Michael Hewson.
“On an economic level it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.”
The AWS outage is 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.
PERPLEXITY, COINBASE, PRIME VIDEO DOWN
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas had said in a post on X.
Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were also facing issues, according to Downdetector.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of 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 US.
Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker confirmed on X that the company’s platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
EUROPE AFFECTED
In Europe, several major mobile phone operators, some UK banks, WhatsApp and Tinder were also affected.
Britain’s Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to DownDetecor’s UK website. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website too was hit by the outage.
