Amazon Outage Disrupts Global Online Services Worldwide

Bassyonni

ago 4 hours

Amazon Outage Disrupts Global Online Services Worldwide

Early Monday, users worldwide experienced significant disruptions in online services due to an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS). This incident affected major platforms including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and the chat application Signal.

Impact of the Amazon Outage

The outage began around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when AWS reported increased error rates across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region. The disruptions lasted for about three hours, with Amazon later announcing recovery efforts.

Services impacted included:

Snapchat
Roblox
Fortnite
Signal
Coinbase
Robinhood
McDonald’s app
Amazon Ring and Alexa

Extent of the Outage

According to DownDetector, a platform that monitors online outages, the issues were possibly tied to AWS. Users also reported difficulties accessing Amazon’s own services, including issues downloading Kindle books.

Cause and Resolution

Amazon attributed the outage to problems with its domain name system, which translates website addresses into IP addresses. By around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS indicated that most affected services were starting to recover.

Timeline of Events:
3:11 a.m. ET: Initial report of increased error rates
6:00 a.m. ET: Recovery efforts commenced
6:30 a.m. ET: Most AWS services operational again

Previous Outages

This incident is part of a trend; AWS has faced similar outages in the past, including a lengthy disruption in late 2021 lasting over five hours. Previous issues also occurred in 2020 and 2017, affecting various sectors and businesses.

The Cloud Infrastructure Dependence

According to cybersecurity expert Patrick Burgess, much of today’s internet relies on a handful of major cloud providers. He emphasized that when outages occur, pinpointing the source can be challenging. Users see the symptoms—service interruptions—without realizing their dependence on AWS.

Future of Reliability

While this outage caused widespread disruption, Burgess reassured that such technical issues are generally resolved quickly. AWS, along with competitors such as Google and Microsoft, has well-established protocols to manage outages, typically addressing them within hours.