Amazon has resolved a significant outage on its cloud computing service that impacted global internet usage, affecting various online services like social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms. The disruption began early Monday morning and lasted for about three hours before services returned to normal operations around 6 p.m. ET, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS, Amazon’s cloud services unit, offers on-demand computing power, data storage, and digital services to businesses, governments, and individuals. The outage caused disruptions across websites and platforms relying on its cloud infrastructure, affecting social media apps like Snapchat and Reddit, as well as businesses worldwide.
The root cause of the issue was an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of the network load balancers. By the afternoon, outage tracking website Downdetector had received over 13 million reports related to the incident, with users in Canada accounting for more than 351,000 reports.
Various companies and services were impacted by the outage, including the Toronto Blue Jays’ Ticketmaster, Snapchat, Pinterest, Amazon’s shopping website, Prime Video, Alexa chatbot, Canadian investment company Wealthsimple, AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, trading app Robinhood, Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Paypal’s Venmo, Chime, Lyft, Signal, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website.
AWS competes with Google and Microsoft in the cloud services market, collectively dominating about 63% of the market share. The outage highlighted the reliance of digital services on a few global cloud providers and the interconnected nature of everyday services.
Experts emphasized the complexity of technology infrastructure and the impact of such disruptions, noting that billions of people were affected by the outage. The incident underscored the critical role of cloud services in modern digital infrastructure and the need for robust backup and recovery measures.
While there were no indications of a cyberattack behind the outage, the widespread disruption raised speculation due to the extensive reach and complexity of AWS’s services. Analysts emphasized the importance of maintaining a resilient and secure cloud infrastructure to prevent similar incidents in the future.