Amazon.com Inc. on Monday said Amazon Web Services was on track for a full recovery after an outage in the world’s largest cloud service took down “half the internet”.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS services,” according to an update on the ‘AWS Health Dashboard’. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Earlier on Monday, the AWS outage knocked out scores of apps and websites, including Perplexity AI, Paypal’s Venmo, as well as Robinhood and Coinbase financial platforms, disrupting business globally. It was the largest disruption since a Crowdstrike malfunction last year.
After roughly three hours of disruptions, systems were gradually coming back online, with AWS saying it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some impacted services. “Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” according to its latest update on the health board.
AWS is the world’s largest cloud services provider, competing with Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure for clients ranging from individuals to companies and governments. Disruptions to its servers can be catastrophic for the internet itself.
The Reason For AWS Outage
Monday’s AWS outage appeared to be with one of the networking systems it uses to control a database product, according to Junaid Ali, software engineer, cyber expert and fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
“As this issue can usually be resolved centrally…unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours,” he told Reuters.
Ookla, owner of outage tracking website Downdetector, said over four million users reported issues due to the incident.
AWS Outage: Apps That Got Affected
Issues on some apps and websites, including Snapchat , Roblox, HBO Max and PayPal’s Venmo were showing signs of easing, according to Downdetector.
Snapchat last had over 4,000 reports on Downdetector, down from an earlier peak of more than 22,000, while reports on Roblox dropped to less than 500 from a peak of over 12,600.
Other services, however, remained affected, with thousands of reports for Reddit on Downdetector. Perplexity AI, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed platform disruptions to AWS.
Amazon’s own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, as were Epic Games’ Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the US.
Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.
AWS Outage: Concentrated Risk
The AWS outage highlights that while businesses are global in outlook, they are tethered to a handful of cloud-services providers.
“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,” Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science, told Reuters.
While there has been no indication yet of a potential cyberattack behind Monday’s outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation.
“When anything like this happens, the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” Rafe Pilling, director (threat intelligence) at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told Reuters. “AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset.”
