Amazon cloud struggles as outage disrupts websites, Snapchat, Fornite, Canva, Hinge, Reddit
Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS is struggling to recover from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites as well as Snapchat and Reddit, some of the world’s most popular apps, disrupting businesses around the world.
The turmoil marks the largest internet outage since last year’s CrowdStrike glitch disrupted technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and underscores the fragility of the world’s interconnected technologies.
After more than nine hours of outage, some apps began gradually coming back online as of 1pm ET (4pm AEDT on Monday).
However, AWS acknowledged that high errors were still affecting many AWS services and was trying to recover connectivity.
An update on AWS’s status page stated that Lambda, one of AWS’s compute services, was experiencing errors due to issues with the internal subsystem.
“We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system.” he said.
AWS had previously said that the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of network load balancers used to distribute traffic across various servers to provide improved performance and capacity.
AWS said the issue was caused by the “EC2 internal network.”
EC2 refers to Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.
Businesses use EC2 to run the virtual servers they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can increase or decrease capacity as needed.
AWS said in an update on its status page that steps to resolve issues with the EC2 system have resulted in some early signs of recovery in a few data centers.
AWS added that it is taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, without offering a specific timeline.
While some apps, such as Reddit and Roblox, were largely stable, other apps, including Snapchat, PayPal’s Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence of issues seen earlier in the day, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.
AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world’s largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud.
Outages in its servers can cause disruptions to websites and platforms that rely on cloud infrastructure, from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems.
AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage was caused by the US-East-1 location in northern Virginia, which is the oldest and largest for web services.
The site experienced outages in 2021 and 2020.
According to the documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is typically the default region for many AWS services.
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform outages and connected them to AWS.
Amazon’s own services, including shopping site Prime Video and Alexa, have also been hit, but most recently Downdetector has seen a decrease in its severity.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Among the gaming platforms affected were Clash Royale and Clash of Clans.
Uber’s rival Lyft was also toppled in the US.
In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed that the messaging app was also affected by the outage.
Experts and academics said the issue underlined how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they are now on a small number of global cloud providers, a disruption that negatively impacts business and daily life.
“The root cause of this problem is that all these big companies are relying on just one service,” said Nishanth Sastry, Research Director at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey.
