Massive AWS outage breaks most of the internet — Live updates on Venmo, Amazon and more

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Ring, an Amazon-owned home security subsidiary, has been affected by the AWS outage all day.

My colleague, John Velasco, shared this image from his Ring system showing the modes aren’t available. He reported that notifications are heavily delayed and that if you subscribe to the home security service the option to change modes is unavailable.

So if you had it turned off, you can’t turn if back on through the app.

Welp, as soon as we posted that last update, AWS dropped their own.

So, what are they saying now?

According to the most recent update, they “continue to observe recovery across all AWS services.” It does not that some customers may still face “intermittent functions errors.”

This does seem reflect a decrease in reports on Down Detector across many of the affected services and AWS itself.

With so many services affected by this outage, it’s hard to know which one is hitting our readers the most…

So we made a poll to find out! Let your voice be heard and tell us which AWS outage is hitting you the hardest. Are you on an epic Snapchat streak? Do you need to get a last-minute birthday present from Amazon? Money stuck in Venmo? Is it something else entirely? Vote in poll and we’ll come back with results later on!

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There seem to be some improvements happening, based on the latest comment from AWS.

“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances continue to progress and we are seeing increased launches of new EC2 instances and decreasing networking connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing significant improvements to Lambda invocation errors, especially when creating new execution environments (including for Lambda@Edge invocations). We will provide an update by 12:00 PM PDT,” reads the status page.

Amazon says its will post another update by 11:30 am PDT (2:30 EDT), so we’ll learn more soon. Hopefully it’s good news!

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Unfortunately, there isn’t much new to report. AWS is hovering a little below 10k reports as of this post, which is where it has been for the last couple of hours.

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“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances are progressing and the internal subsystems of EC2 are now showing early signs of recovering in a few Availability Zones (AZs) in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are applying mitigations to the remaining AZs at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside,” reads the company’s latest status update.

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Amazon is seeing another downturn in reports. Could this be the beginning of the end or is just users no reporting outages as frequently. We’ll continue to monitor.

As of this writing, our quiz asking how much this outage is affecing you on a scale of 1-100 is a 81%. But there’s still time to vote!

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Zooming out on Down Detector is truly a sight to behold. Everything from gambling sites to social networks to videos games are dealing with outages because of these AWS problems. It’s scary.

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AWS updated its status page, albeit a little late. The company said, “We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services. Lambda is experiencing function invocation errors because an internal subsystem was impacted by the network load balancer health checks. We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system. For EC2 launch instance failures, we are in the process of validating a fix and will deploy to the first AZ as soon as we have confidence we can do so safely. We will provide an update by 10:45 AM PDT.”

Based on that, it looks like we’re going to have to wait another 45+ minutes to see if anything major changes.

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We’re receiving a lot of interesting tidbits from different analysts talking about the far-reaching effects of this outage. One that stood out says that $75 million is being lost per hour that this outage continues — with Amazon itself taking more than $72 million of that figure.

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Half the internet is down, so it was only a matter of time until the fast food industry felt it. But why Wendy’s?

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“We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT,” reads the company’s live blog.

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We’re seeing a huge rise in reports for Peloton (relative to the size of the service). It’s at almost 800 reports, which is a high number. Users are obviously having issues connecting the relatively costly exercise service.

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Amazon might have a solution on the horizon!

Almost everyone is being impacted by this outage in some way, but we’re curious how much it’s messing with your flow. Vote in the poll above and let’s see how much Tom’s Guide readers are being put out by this AWS situation, which experts say could cost billions of dollars.

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We’re seeing more reports on Down Detector for AWS than when this first started. The previous peak was around 6,000, and now it’s up to 6,400. It’s clear this outage is going to last a while longer, but hopefully not for too long, as the internet is really struggling today.

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AWS released a status update that doesn’t offer much clarity. In short, the company acknowledges the issue and is investigating, which was already the assumed situation.

“Oct 20 8:04 AM PDT We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network. We continue to investigate and identify mitigations,” reads the AWS status page.

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It looks like some people are experiencing issues with Verizon, though it’s unclear whether it’s landlines or mobile at this time. We also don’t know if this one is linked to AWS or something else entirely, but we’ll certainly keep an eye on it either way.

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Pinterest, another popular social network, is seeing a rise in reports. Like many of the big outages, we have to assume this one is connected to AWS and the ongoing issues it’s having. It really puts into perspective how much we rely on Amazon Web Services to keep the internet chugging along smoothly.

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For those who aren’t in the know, Life360 is a location-sharing app that families and friends use in close circles to see each other’s live locations on a private map. This is good for establishing designated meeting points, and giving people an SOS button for emergencies, while also ensuring people get home safe.

This service (unfortunately) is on AWS, and the app is down for a lot of people. For those who are just looking after their loved ones, this is incredibly problematic.

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Oh boy, here we go again. With a ginormous spike of 4,440 outage reports on Down detector, Venmo is down again!

As we’ve seen from the past one, your money should be safe if you have any in transit. And you can report anything that seems off with your transfers once you’re back on. But this again seems to be down to that rate cap. No update from AWS yet on lifting it!

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When it rains, it pours for Amazon. The company has now confirmed some significant API errors (basically the way developers plug their work into), and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region!

We’re starting to see what that means across lots of services.

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While in the U.S. there’s been some big outages of banks and grocery services, the U.K. has seen outages of Government sites like HMRC (the bit that deals with tax and revenue) and the overall Government website.

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This spike makes the potential Apple Music outage look like a minor speed bump! Over 1,000 reports in the past few minutes, with 54% of people across the U.S. reporting audio streaming issues. This, again (I believe) is probably down to the rate cap that AWS has put in place to ease pressure while fixes are implemented.

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Even though Apple Music outage reports continues to grow, Apple itself is confirming that the outage has been resolved. We’ll see whether this is true in a few minutes if that curve goes down.

Also worth noting if you’re having business, school management or iCloud issues, the Cupertino crew are already looking into these too.

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Looking for tasteful living room ideas or inspirational quotes written entirely in helvetica? That’s not going to be possible for a lot of you, as the rate cap has seemingly spiked outage reports on Down Detector about Pinterest.

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OK, so, we’re all a bit confused because Amazon tells us its fixed, but then services are still experiencing problems. Now there’s an update, and it paints a bit more of a picture.

Basically, what Amazon is trying to say here is that while the DNS issue has been fixed (the digital phonebook of the internet now directs people to the right places), the tool that connects people is still jammed, and are causing massive slowdown across all of its sites.

This is why services are being rate limited, to stop the system from crashing and allow the existing problems to fully clear. This is a temporary cap on how many people can go to certain sites — like a bouncer at a crowded Halloween party (I’m dressing up as Peacemaker btw). This should stop the system from crashing and allow existing problems to fully clear.

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Online grocery shopping might be off the cards for you atm, as a huge jump in Instacart outage reports has just occurred. We’re trying to get to the bottom of what’s happened here, but everything seems to be tying back to the EC2 instance launches not being effective or scaling to a larger pool of users.

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Uh oh… The peak around the first stint of the AWS outage hit 359. Now it’s peaked again at 364 with users reporting music streaming problems. Issues seem to be localized to New York and Los Angeles right now, but could be more widespread as the U.S. wakes up and tries to play their get up playlist!

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The AWS outage is massive, and to know just how big it is, there are over 1,000 companies affected by the Amazon Web Services issues this morning, as per a BBC report.

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Even those morning coffees (to redeem points, anyway) from Starbucks were being affected by the AWS outage! It’s been on the rise, but now it’s finally seeing a dip in reports, which is hopefully signs that a fix is now in place.

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While some services like Reddit are getting fixed, Ring outage reports are on the rise, now at 3,296 as of writing. Hopefully, we’ll see that number drop like the many other services right now.

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This is an encouraging sign. Still a long way away from the baseline, but that’s a big dip in a short amount of time!

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For those looking to redeem points on their monday morning caffeine infusion may come a cropper, as the Starbucks app is down, due to the AWS issues. The fix has been deployed, but Amazon’s now going through a backlog of smaller issues to fix these smaller disruptions.

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This I didn’t expect. BT in the U.K. does have a site that runs on AWS, which is now loading fine. But broadband problems are being reported and there’s a big spike around it.

The physical layer of the broadband connectivity is not dealt with by cloud providers, but it does run the things like customer account management, billing and network intelligence (to keep things running). So something may have happened here.

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The issue has appeared as an incident report on Reddit’s status page, and the Down detector reports have peaked. Something tells me AWS may have gotten around to looking at the Lambda and Cloudtrail problems.

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OK, so we have a new update from Amazon! In short, things are just about back to normal. The underlying DNS issue has “been fully mitigated,” so the internet phonebook problem has been resolved. And because of that, “most AWS service operations are succeeding normally now.”

But we’re not fully out of the woods yet, as there are some lingering issues here. Namely “a backlog of events,” as the giant traffic jam is still clearing for some specific tools like Lambda that runs code, and Cloudtrail that keeps a record of all the activity. I’m certain that Reddit uses these two services, so it’s no big surprise to connect the dots and see this still being knocked out of service.

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Even though the AWS fix is deployed, Ring is still down for many people. Ring has (finally) acknowledged the outage across all its services and apps, and the Down detector outage reports are going back up.

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With AWS outages, retailers get hit hard. It’s one thing to talk about the outages of free services users are on. But what about retailers and paid-for services. They can cause issues like duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages and more.

“When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also triggers a domino effect across payment flows,” Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911 commented. “Failed authorizations, duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages, all of that fuels a wave of disputes that merchants will be cleaning up for weeks. And once a customer files a dispute, you are already on the back foot.”

Her advice to retailers seeing this? Get ahead of it: “The outage will end long before the disputes do. Any business that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind. Downtime happens, but silence and slow responses are what cause real damage.”

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55% of people reporting the app is down, while 34% are complaining about website outages. It’s a sticky situation that seems to stretch beyond AWS fixes. Or there could be a scenario where the deployment of AWS’ fix has knocked out Reddit. Nobody can be sure as Reddit’s status page only reports “degraded performance.”

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This seems to be both app and website loading. How is Reddit going in the wrong direction when the fix is deployed!? We’re looking into this now

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Amazon is continuing to see “recovery across most of the affected AWS services.” On top of that, the company confirms that “global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1” have also recovered.

With this in mind, we should start to expect a lot of these impacted services across gaming, streaming, banking and more to return to normal.

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Roblox is back to normal levels, Epic Games Store service seems to be back online (and Fortnite by extension), Dead by Daylight has resumed, and Steam, Rocket League and Pokémon GO are almost back to normal.

PlayStation Network is showing no issues too. Looks as if the fix has resolved some of the anti-cheat issues that seem to have caused the blockages due to AWS.

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So far, according to the Reddit status page, the infrastructure of the service is undergoing “degraded performance,” which is backed up by nearly 5,000 outage reports on Down Detector!

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Amazon outage reports are down below 1,000. Chances are most of you can start shopping again on the app!

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Things seem to be on the way back to normal in my homeland. Government services are back to normal, and banks are on the way back.

This is what a lot of people on Reddit are seeing. This is indicative of the DNS and latency issues experienced in this AWS outage. Basically, the digital phonebook has been corrected, to take people to the right place, but the lanes of traffic haven’t been fixed properly yet.

This is creating huge tailbacks on the digital highway of the internet, and causing loading issues like this. As per Amazon’s advice, keep trying as things gradually go back to normal!

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Amazon has claimed that there are “significant signs of recovery,” and the outage reports are dropping off quick on the AWS down detector. Fingers crossed this isn’t just a “fixing your own front door at the expense of others” kind of situation (the dropping reports across other services indicate this isn’t the case), but we’ll keep an eye on it.

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So it looks like Amazon pressing the “Go” button appears to have fixed it. The team is working through a “backlog of queued requests,” but things are on the up and up.

Someone tell that to Reddit, though!

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Well this is awkward. As other services seem to be seeing services gradually get back to normal, AWS’ fix may have knocked out Reddit’s app.

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That’s a huge spike of Reddit outages! Just happened.

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OK! Now we’re getting somewhere. According to the most recent AWS update, the fix is starting to work. The first big fix is in place, fixing the DNS problem (correcting the digital phonebook), and that is creating some “early signs of recovery.”

But Amazon is not done yet. Things will be bumpy for a while as additional latency is expected (traffic will be moving slowly for a while), and there’s still a big backlog.

But in short, Amazon’s hit the “go” button on the fix, and they’re watching to make sure it works.

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CharacterAI is serving as a resource for all your RP needs with an AI avatar. But since it’s a service running on AWS, we’re seeing outages here too!

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United airlines is down, and users of other airlines are experiencing app problems too.

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With AWS working in parallel on multiple fixes, it looks as if they’re starting to take affect. in the U.S., outage reports are on the way down, and in the U.K., it’s peaked with a few key services reports starting to come down too (think banks and government services).

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We have an update! Let’s break it down. In short, Amazon’s found the main bad guy, and it’s a DNS issue!

DNS is the internet’s phone book, packing a name (the URL) and a secret phone number (the IP address).

All of these are stored in the digital filing cabinet known as DynamoDB, and several fixes at once are being deployed to speedily fix this issue.

Amazon recommends that if anyone is facing issues to “continue to retry any failed requests.”

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Dating apps are also being hit too, as Hinge has been disrupted by the AWS outage. People are experiencing app opening faults and server connection issues.

According to AWS, an update will be shared “as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”

This hasn’t happened, so I’ll update you instead! It looks as if some of the AWS issues with the US-East-1 region (what looks to be one of the key centerpoints for a lot of the internet) have been resolved, but not all the way. Reports have started dropping by 20-30% across the board.

These updates haven’t hit the UK yet, as reports continue to be high with no sign of tailing off.

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Looks as if some of OpenAI’s services rely on AWS too. They’re experiencing some Single Sign On (SSO) issues that will stop people logging into their ChatGPT, and the API for developer’s apps to work.

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While in the U.S. it’s looking like all private companies have been hit by the AWS issues, in the U.K., the issue is a little more deeply rooted in some key infrastructure.

Online banking is down, and most concerningly, it’s looking like it’s impacting government services too.

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This is what’s making me a little cautious to say the issue has actually been fixed. In the U.K. those outage graphs continue to go up.

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You can see how the symmetry of these peaks match up quite nicely with AWS’ movement. My suspicion is the team has identified the issue. But we’ll wait and see…

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“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issues, and fully understanding the root cause,” a rep from AWS has said in the most recent update on the progress fixing this outage.

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Standby for more, but we’re seeing the peaks of outage reports start to fall off. All we know at the moment is that Amazon is working on the issue. The devs may have identified the problem.

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If you were looking to stream your favorite movies or TV shows, you may be running into some issues! Disney+, Prime Video and Hulu have been hit by this outage.

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Meanwhile, a look over at Down Detector in the UK shows how widespread this is. The AWS outage in North Virginia is hitting us Brits too, and it’s impacting Snapchat, Ring, all the usual suspects. Concerningly, it’s also hitting banks too.

What is Amazon DynamoDB? Think of a super-fast digital filing cabinet that many apps use to save and find info quickly (like user profiles or game scores). With this being disrupted, things that rely on it will likely stop working (as we’re seeing across a whole lot of services).

As for the 20 other services that are impacted (affected but not totally broken), these will cause the services to run slowly or have hiccups. This was first reported at 12:11am PDT (3:11am ET, 8:11am BST).

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So…there’s a real technical issue going on here. It’s disrupting DynamoDB and impacting 20 other services, which leads to “increased error rates and latencies.”

Let’s break it down — imagine AWS as the huge digital power plant for the internet. North Virginia (US-EAST-1 Region) is one of the biggest neighborhoods this plant serves. The increased error rates means a lot of packages of data are getting dropped or sent to the wrong place, and the latencies mean that those delivery trucks are moving really slowly.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is responsible for hosting a whole lot of services and websites across the web. And because of servers going down across the planet, it’s having a knock-on effect on other websites, services and games.

For example, huge outages are being reported at Snapchat, Robinhood, Venmo, Roblox, Fortnite, Ring, Epic Games Store, Lyft, Pokémon GO and many more.

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