{"id":91429,"date":"2025-10-21T04:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T04:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91429\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T04:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T04:44:09","slug":"amazon-services-recovering-as-snapchat-and-banks-among-sites-hit-by-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91429\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon services ‘recovering’ as Snapchat and banks among sites hit by outage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liv McMahonTechnology reporter and<\/p>\n

Lily JamaliNorth America Technology Correspondent<\/p>\n

\"GettyGetty Images<\/p>\n

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had resolved a massive outage that knocked some of the world’s largest websites offline for much of the day.<\/p>\n

More than 1,000 apps and websites – including social media platforms like Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax – were impacted by problems that Amazon said were at the heart of the cloud computing giant’s operations in the US.<\/p>\n

The platform outage monitor Downdetector said user reports of problems globally soared to more than 11 million during the outage on Monday.<\/p>\n

Even after Amazon fixed the underlying problem, experts said the outage demonstrated the perils of having so many companies rely on a single, dominant provider.<\/p>\n

“What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is,” said Prof Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey.<\/p>\n

“So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers.<\/p>\n

“Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”<\/p>\n

The issues appear to have begun at around 07:00 BST on Monday, as users began to report problems accessing a slew of platforms.<\/p>\n

This included a wide range of different sites and services, from massive online games like Fortnite to the language-learning app Duolingo.<\/p>\n

Early in the day, Downdetector told the BBC it had seen more than four million reports from users across 500 sites within just a few hours – more than double the amount it would see across an entire regular weekday.<\/p>\n

These later peaked at more than 11 million, it said, as more services including Reddit and Lloyds Bank attempted to recover.<\/p>\n

At around 2300 BST, Amazon said all AWS services had “returned to normal operations.”<\/p>\n

But not before the company had to throttle parts of its own system in order to address the root issue.<\/p>\n

A new series of “cascading failures” may have arisen after the initial outage, according to Mike Chapple, an information technology professor at Notre Dame University.<\/p>\n

“It’s like when you have a large-scale power outage. Crews start working to try to bring it back on line,” Mr Chapple said. “The power might flicker a few times,” he explained, but it’s possible Amazon had initially “only addressed the symptoms” and not the cause.<\/p>\n

What went wrong?<\/p>\n

Amazon has not yet fully detailed what caused Monday’s outage or issued an official statement regarding it.<\/p>\n

It said in an update on its service status web page the issue “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1”.<\/p>\n

DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, is often likened to a phone book for the internet.<\/p>\n

It effectively translates the website names people use (like bbc.co.uk) into numbers which can be read and understood by computers.<\/p>\n

This process basically underpins the way we use the internet, and disruptions to it can leave web browsers unable to locate the content they are looking for.<\/p>\n

Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, told the BBC the AWS outage highlighted the power cloud services have over how the internet works.<\/p>\n

“Everyone has a bad day, today Amazon had a bad day,” he said. <\/p>\n

“There are amazing things about the cloud, it allows you to scale\u2026 but if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on.”<\/p>\n

And Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, told the BBC it was “a bit like a bridge collapsing”.<\/p>\n

“An essential part of the economy has fallen to pieces,” she said.<\/p>\n

And with so much of cloud computing relying on Amazon, Microsoft and Google – estimated at around 70% – she said the status quo was “unsustainable”.<\/p>\n

“Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms.<\/p>\n

“That’s a risk to our security, our sovereignty and our economy and we need to look at structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kind of shocks.”<\/p>\n

Watch: BBC’s Lucy Woodham asks Cardiff students about Snapchat outage<\/p>\n

One computer science expert says some of the responsibility rests with the companies that use AWS.<\/p>\n

“Companies using Amazon haven’t been taking enough adequate care to build protection systems into their applications,” says Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University in New York.<\/p>\n

Outages like the one on Monday occur frequently, although not always at this scale.<\/p>\n

Birman tells the BBC that app developers should take care to invest in backing up mission-critical applications that live in the cloud.<\/p>\n

“We know how to make these systems stronger, and we know how to do it securely,” Birman says.<\/p>\n

The question of responsibility could well land in the courts.<\/p>\n

More than a year after the massive CrowdStrike outage, Delta Airlines is still wrangling with the company to recover more than $500m in losses.<\/p>\n

Even after CrowdStrike had fixed the issue, the airline said it had to manually reset 40,000 servers, leading to major flight delays over several days.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Esyllt Carr.<\/p>\n

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