Amazon Web Services outage hitting platforms around world ‘showing signs of recovery’ | Internet

A major internet outage affected dozens of websites and applications around the world; Users reported that they were having trouble getting online following problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service.

Platforms affected include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo, as well as a number of Amazon-owned operations, including its main retail site and Ring doorbell company.

In the UK, Lloyds Bank was affected, as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland. There were also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. In the UK, Ring users complained on social media that their doorbells were not working.

In the UK alone, reports of issues with individual apps have reached tens of thousands of issues for each platform. Other platforms affected included Wordle, Coinbase, Duolingo, Slack, Pokémon Go, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, and Peloton.

At 10.30am UK time, Amazon was reporting that the issue, which first surfaced around 8am, had been resolved as AWS was “seeing significant signs of improvement”. Regarding the US east coast region, it added at 11:00am: “We can confirm that global services and features based on US-EAST-1 have also improved.”

Amazon said the problem originated at its Amazon Web Services unit, which provides vital web infrastructure for many companies on the east coast of the United States that rent space on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am BST), Amazon confirmed that “error rates and delays have increased” for AWS services in a region on the US east coast. The ripple effect appeared to hit services worldwide, with the site Downdetector reporting issues with the same sites on multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes is a service Monitors internet outagesalso reported an increase in problems Monday morning, with most of them located in Virginia, where Amazon’s US-East-1 region is located, where AWS said the problems began.

Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos, said the outage appeared to be an IT issue rather than a cyberattack. AWS’s online health dashboard was referring to DynamoDB, the database system that allows websites to access its data.

“When something like this happens, the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” he said. “AWS has a wide-ranging and complex footprint, so any issue could cause a major inconvenience. In this case, it appears to be an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to fix this as an absolute priority.”

Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital at human rights organization ARTICLE 19, said the outage highlighted the dangers of too much digital infrastructure falling into the hands of too few people.

“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure that supports democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communication cannot be dependent on a handful of companies,” he said.

The UK government said it was in contact with Amazon over Monday’s internet outage.

A spokesman said: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services and various online services that use their infrastructure. We are in communication with the company through our established incident response arrangements, working to restore services as quickly as possible.”