AWS Outage Disrupts Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, and More Services
A significant outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) has disrupted numerous online services, affecting popular applications and websites. On October 20, 2023, many users experienced issues with platforms like Venmo, Snapchat, and Fortnite, alongside Amazon’s Alexa assistant, due to a DNS resolution problem. As of 1:15 PM ET, the issue remained unresolved for several services.
AWS Outage Overview
The outage began early in the morning when AWS reported increased error rates and latency in the US-EAST-1 region, primarily Northern Virginia. By 3:11 AM ET, AWS was aware of the problems, attributing them to issues with its DynamoDB API.
Timeline of Events
- 3:11 AM ET: AWS identifies increased errors and latency in US-EAST-1.
- 5:01 AM ET: The company discovers a DNS resolution issue causing the outage.
- 12:08 PM ET: AWS confirms the DNS issue was fully mitigated by 2:24 AM PDT.
- 8:48 AM ET: AWS informs clients of progress in resolving EC2 instance launch issues.
- 10:14 AM ET: Significant API errors reported, leading to service disruptions.
Among the services affected were popular apps and websites such as banks, airlines, Disney+, and Reddit. Many users took to social media, voicing frustration as applications failed to load or responded sluggishly.
Impact on Users and Services
The outage created a ripple effect across numerous sectors reliant on AWS. Applications that normally ensure functionality faced downtime, impacting users worldwide. With AWS hosting about 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market, the dependency on its services highlights vulnerabilities in internet reliability.
Continued Issues and Recovery
As of mid-morning on October 20, many platforms continued to experience slow performance or complete inactivity. Despite AWS’s assertion of returning to normal service operations, there remained significant backlogs in processing requests, prolonging the outage’s overall impact.
Experts pointed out that such outages demonstrate the challenges of relying heavily on a few providers, raising concerns about internet infrastructure vulnerability. As the internet ecosystem becomes increasingly interconnected, events like these might lead to widespread service disruptions in the future.
AWS continues to work on recovery efforts to stabilize services, indicating ongoing improvements. However, the issue has served as a reminder for companies to diversify their infrastructure dependencies to mitigate risks associated with centralized service outages.
