Global Outage Hits Amazon Web Services, Affecting World's Biggest Apps and Websites

Strategic Insights -

The world's largest cloud computing provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced a significant outage on Monday, causing widespread disruptions to a number of high-profile apps and websites. The outage, which affected other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, led to a spike in reported outages across various platforms, including Snapchat, Duolingo, Canva, and Roblox.

Key Takeaways:

  • The outage was confirmed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 9:26am on Monday, with a service health update stating "significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region."
  • The issue affected other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, including Support Cases, which customers may have been unable to create or update.
  • Engineers were immediately engaged to mitigate the issue and fully understand the root cause.
  • The outage also affected other services, including Slack, Ring, Vodafone, Signal, Virgin Media, BT, EE, and Sky.
  • Customers reported an increase in outage reports at UK banks, including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, with 6,925 Downdetector outage reports at Lloyds at 9:31am.
  • HMRC spokesperson stated that they are working urgently with AWS to resolve the issue and recommended calling their phonelines at a later time when possible.
  • Roblox was down for approximately 45 minutes during the outage.
  • Duolingo experienced significant delays, with users reporting errors when trying to access the app.
  • Canva was affected, with users unable to access the platform.
  • Snapchat was also affected, with users reporting issues accessing the app.
  • The outage affected a total of 26 high-profile apps and websites, including:

+ Amazon.com

+ Prime Video

+ AWS

+ Ring

+ Goodreads

+ The New York Times

+ Slack

+ Zoom

+ Substack

+ Robinhood

+ Venmo

+ Chime

+ Coinbase

+ Xero

+ HMRC

+ Roblox

+ Fortnite

+ PUBG (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds)

+ Rainbow Six Siege

+ Clash Royale

+ Clash of Clans

+ Crunchyroll

+ Apple TV

+ Canva

+ Duolingo

+ MyFitnessPal

+ Strava

+ Whatnot

+ Life360

+ Verizon

+ Perplexity AI

+ Flickr

+ McDonald's app

+ Wordle

+ Xbox Network

+ PlayStation Network

Statistics:

  • 6,925 Downdetector outage reports at Lloyds at 9:31am.
  • The outage affected a total of 26 high-profile apps and websites.
  • AWS is the world's largest cloud computing provider, offering a wide variety of services, including storage, databases, machine learning, and security tools.

Sources:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) service health update, posted at 9:26am on Monday.
  • Downdetector outage reports.
  • HMRC spokesperson.
  • BBC News article, "Amazon Web Services outage hits global apps and websites", by Laura Pollock.
  • AWS, "Service Health Update", dated 9:26am on Monday (no date provided in the source material).