Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption early on Monday because of a problem at Amazon’s cloud computing service that took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.<\/p>\n
LONDON (AP) \u2014 Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption early on Monday because of a problem at Amazon\u2019s cloud computing service that took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.<\/p>\n
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem.<\/a><\/p>\n Amazon Web Services provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press, which allows them to provide online services.<\/p>\n On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald\u2019s app and many other services. DownDetector said the problems were: \u201cPossibly related to issues at Amazon Web Services.\u201d<\/p>\n Coinbase and Signal both said on X that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.<\/p>\n Even Amazon\u2019s own services weren\u2019t immune. Users of the company\u2019s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren\u2019t working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.<\/p>\n Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to their domain name system, an apparatus that converts web addresses into IP addresses so websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.<\/p>\n The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it was \u201cinvestigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.\u201d<\/p>\n Later, the company reported that there were \u201csignificant error rates\u201d and that engineers were \u201cactively working\u201d on the problem.<\/p>\n Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said that it was seeing recovery across most of the affected services. \u201cWe can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,\u201d it said, adding that it is working on a \u201cfull resolution.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not the first time issues with Amazon\u2019s key services have caused widespread disruptions. Many popular internet services were down after a brief outage in 2023<\/a>. AWS\u2019s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies \u2014 everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services \u2014 were affected for more than five hours<\/a>. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company reported that 64 internal AWS services were affected by the issue.<\/p>\n AWS customers include some of the world\u2019s biggest businesses and organizations.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there\u2019s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum\u201d of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.<\/p>\n \u201cThe world now runs on the cloud,\u201d and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.<\/p>\n And because so much of the online world\u2019s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, \u201cit\u2019s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don\u2019t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,\u201d Burgess said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve)\u201d and there\u2019s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue, something\u2019s gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n There are \u201cwell-established processes\u201d to deal with outages at Amazon Web Services, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, which together provide most of the world\u2019s cloud computing infrastructure, Burgess said, adding that such outages are usually fixed in \u201chours rather than days.\u201d<\/p>\n Amazon Web Services said at about 6:30 a.m. Eastern time that \u201cmost AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.\u201d<\/p>\n Copyright
\n \u00a9\u00a02025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption early on Monday because of a problem at Amazon’s cloud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[414,1795,371,111,139,69,68014,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-90262","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-amazon-web-services","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-tech-outage","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}