AWS Outage Disrupts Major Websites Before Gradual Recovery

Users reported issues with websites including Amazon, Snapchat, Disney+, Reddit, and Canva, according to the website Downdetector.

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, said that the downtime prevented many customers from using the site.

Users on social media also mentioned disruptions in cloud-based games, such as Fortnite and Roblox.

Leading cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services announced a significant outage on Monday that brought down a number of well-known websites.

In an update at 2:01 a.m. PDT, AWS mentioned a “operational problem” impacting “several services” and said that it was “working on various parallel approaches to hasten recovery.” It impacted over 70 of its own services.

AWS said shortly after that it was seeing “strong indicators of recovery.”

According to an update from AWS, the problem has been “completely mitigated” by 3:35 a.m. PDT, and the majority of AWS Service activities “are operating regularly now.”

It said that some services were still working through a backlog and that “some queries may be throttled as we work toward complete resolution.”

Users reported issues with websites such as Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, the McDonald’s app, the New York Times, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo, and Verizon, according to the website Downdetector.

According to Downdetector, there were also problems with the British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue & Customs.

“We are aware of a problem impacting Amazon Web Services and other online services which depend on their infrastructure,” a government spokeswoman told CNBC. We communicate with the firm via our defined crisis response procedures, and they are attempting to promptly restore services.

Lloyds Banking Group acknowledged that certain of its services were unavailable and urged users to “be patient” until it restored them. It also said that services were returning to the internet around twenty minutes later.

Customers of United and Delta complained on social media that they were unable to check in, drop off their baggage, or locate their reservations online.

While cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase reported that many customers were unable to use the site because of the outage, other social media users reported disruptions in cloud-based games, such as Roblox and Fortnite.

“We are noticing dramatically elevated mistake rates which are compromising functionality on Canva,” the graphic creation platform Canva said. Our underlying cloud provider is having serious problems.

Create an AI search tool that also affects perplexity. “AWS is the primary reason. In an X post, CEO Aravind Srinivas said, “We are working on rectifying it.”

It is not the first time a technical problem has impacted a major corporation; in July 2024, a poor software update by cybersecurity company Crowdstrike exposed the vulnerability of the world’s technology infrastructure by causing Microsoft Windows systems to go down, causing millions of dollars’ worth of chaos and interrupting thousands of flights. It also had an impact on banks and hospitals.

“This AWS outage seems to be a technical issue impacting one of Amazon’s primary data centers; there is no indication that it was the result of a cyberattack,” said Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity firm NymVPN, in a statement. Because so many websites and applications depend on AWS, these problems may arise when systems are overloaded or a critical component of the network goes down, and the effects spread swiftly.

This event serves as a reminder that resilience is just as important to cybersecurity as threat defense. As with cyberattacks, businesses should prepare for technological failures by making sure they have backup systems, redundancy, and multi-cloud plans to keep services operational in the event of an emergency, he said.

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