From banks to artificial intelligence servers to video conferencing, a massive amount of the world's biggest websites are down because of the Amazon Web Services outage.
Tracking website Down Detector has registered over 2000 reports of outages and problems from companies from a range of different industries around the world: Canva, HMRC, Zoom, Perplexity AI and more detailed below.
A statement released by Amazon confirms that they are aware of the mass of errors, though they do not confirm the reason behind the outages they are "actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue.”
While AWS engineers are working on "multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery," there is no official estimated time for a full resolution.
This wide-scale failure is a sharp reminder of the internet's reliance on centralized services.
It follows the massive CrowdStrike outage in July 2024, where a faulty security software update caused millions of Windows computers to crash globally, disrupting airlines, hospitals, and payment systems. Both incidents should be a wake up call on the fragility of the modern digital infrastructure.
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the tech giants cloud computing platform. The impact of the outage has been so wide spread as the e most popular and dominant cloud computing platform in terms of market share for cloud infrastructure services (IaaS and PaaS combined)
AWS provides, on-demand IT resources and services, this includes computing power, database storage, networking, analytics, machine learning, and more to individuals, enterprises, and governments via the internet.
Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical servers and data centers, customers can access these resources with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which allows them to scale their services up or down based on their needs. AWS essentially acts as a virtual data center, that allows organizations to lower computational costs, increase agility, and evolve faster.
What is Affected by the Amazon Web Services Outage?
The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused widespread disruptions across various sectors. Amazon's own services were directly impacted, including Amazon Alexa, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video, and Blink Security and Ring smart home products.
Social media and communication platforms like Snapchat, Signal, Slack, and Zoom also experienced issues.
Finance and business services faced problems, affecting platforms like Ancestry, Asana, Atlassian (Jira, Smartsheet), Coinbase, Perplexity AI, Square, Xero, and major banks including Bank Of Scotland, Halifax, and Lloyds Bank, as well as the government service HMRC.
The outage also hit online gaming and entertainment, taking down services for Dead By Daylight, Epic Games Store, Fortnite, Playstation Network, Pokemon Go, Roblox, Rocket League, Clash Of Clans, Clash Royale, IMDB, and Tidal. Finally, numerous other apps and utilities were affected, such as BT, Canva, Duolingo, EE, Eventbrite, Flickr, Hay Day, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Peloton, Sky Mobile, Vodafone, and Wordle.
What Caused Amazon Web Services Outage?
The Amazon Web Services Outage has been localised to an operational issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically impacting its crucial US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region.
AWS has officially confirmed "increased error rates and latencies" for multiple core services in that region, particularly Amazon DynamoDB (a key database service) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides virtual servers.
The cause is currently thought to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.
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