Cloud services outage knocks out websites globally
A major cloud services outage has affected Canva, Roblox, Snapchat, Amazon and other websites around the world, including Australia, potentially affecting millions of users.
The problem is Amazon Web Services, the cloud services arm of technology giant Amazon, and AWS status checker shows that multiple services are “affected” by operational issues.
An AWS outage affected websites worldwide.Credit: down detector
The company says it is “investigating increased error rates and delays for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” but the issues are affecting websites worldwide.
Cloud computing is part of the backbone that runs the internet. Everything from startups to large enterprises uses AWS. Netflix streams video through it, Airbnb runs its platform through it, and countless companies host websites and apps there.
Outage website Down Detector Hinge, the publisher of this masthead, cited issues plaguing dozens of sites, including Fortnite and Nine.
Amazon said its engineers were urgently working on a fix. “We have identified a potential root cause of error rates for DynamoDB APIs in the US-East-1 Region,” the tech giant said in a statement at 20:01 AEDT. “Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint on US-EAST-1.
“We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Amazon’s Alexa service is also reportedly down for many users around the world.
Canva said that “error rates have increased significantly” affecting the site’s functionality and that it is “actively investigating the issue” to restore access as soon as possible. It first reported the incident at 6.14pm (AEDT), saying Canva and its features were “currently unavailable for some users”.
