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An Amazon AWS outage has affected major websites and apps in New Zealand and globally
Downdetector has reported widespread issues and a number of organisations have cited the AWS outage as the cause
Communications, financial, news and gaming platforms are among those impacted
Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday, causing connectivity issues for many companies around the world and disrupting services for many popular websites and apps.
New Zealand sites affected
On Monday night, Downdetector.co.nz reported issues with AWS, Alexa, TVNZ, Spark, One, Facebook, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Ring, Epic Games, Playstation Network, Steam, MyFitnessPal, Duolingo and Wordle among others.
Sky New Zealand said issues with its On Demand services were connected to the AWS outage: “… thanks for bearing with us. There is currently an Amazon Web Services global issue that’s affecting On Demand viewing for New Sky Box, Sky Pod, Sky Go, and Neon customers.”
– RNZ
International outages widespread
AWS said it was seeing increased “error rates and latencies” for multiple services, Reuters reported.
At about 10:30 pm on Monday, NZ time, AWS said a potential root cause had been found and initial measures to mitigate the problem applied, followed by a report of some early signs of recovery for some AWS services.
“During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution,” it said.
The AWS outage was 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.
AWS directed Reuters to its status page when requested for a comment, while Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites 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.
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 chief executive Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Britain’s Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, DownDetecor’s UK website said. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website too was hit by the outage.
However, billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of social media company X, said that his platform continued to work. “X works,” he said, without commenting further.
– Reuters