‘Half the internet’ goes down in mysterious outage disrupting major websites

Dozens of popular websites crashed on Friday, leaving possibly millions of users unable to access online services.

The problems began around 6:40 a.m. and affected a number of services including Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit and streaming platform Hulu, according to Downdetector, which tracks online outages.

The widespread outage appeared to be linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which confirmed it was investigating connectivity issues affecting multiple services in the US-West-2 region in Oregon.

AWS issued the warning at 4:40 a.m. PDT (7:40 a.m. ET), but the problems may have started before the company made them public.

The outage affected at least five AWS services, including AWS Direct Connect, AWS Internet Connectivity, AWS IoT Core, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

AWS provides the computing power and online infrastructure used by countless websites, applications, and businesses; This means that a regional fault can disrupt many seemingly unrelated services simultaneously.

Amazon EC2 provides the virtual servers on which websites and applications run, while API Gateway allows different online systems to communicate with each other.

Issues affecting AWS Internet Connectivity and Direct Connect may also prevent businesses and users from accessing services hosted in the affected region.

Dozens of popular websites crashed on Friday, possibly leaving millions without access

Cloudflare also said it was investigating network performance issues in Western North America, but it was not immediately clear whether the two incidents were related.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure companies, driving online traffic and helping websites stay fast, secure and accessible.

‘We are working to analyze and mitigate this problem. More updates will follow shortly, Cloudflare said on its health page.

This is a developing story… More updates to come.