Amazon Web Services has pinpointed the main issue behind a significant service interruption that affected numerous websites and popular apps worldwide on Monday. The cloud services division of Amazon provides computing resources and digital services to various clients, with disruptions impacting social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, as well as businesses globally. The outage, first noted at 3:10 a.m. ET, started to show signs of recovery by 6 a.m. ET, with ongoing efforts to fully restore services. The root cause was identified as an internal subsystem monitoring network load balancers.
By midday, Downdetector had received over 9.8 million user reports related to the incident, emphasizing the substantial impact of AWS on internet infrastructure. Various services, including Ticketmaster, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Amazon’s own platforms, experienced issues. Companies like Wealthsimple, Perplexity, Coinbase, and Robinhood confirmed being affected by the outage. Slack and Trint also reported disruptions, while gaming sites like Fortnite and financial platforms such as Venmo and Chime faced issues.
Additionally, Lyft, Signal, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and HMRC in the UK encountered problems. AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure dominate the cloud market, with AWS holding the largest market share. Experts highlighted the interconnected nature of digital services and the reliance on a handful of global cloud providers, underscoring the widespread impact of such outages. The incident serves as a reminder of the complexity of everyday technology and the vulnerability when relying on a small number of service providers. The AWS outage, the most significant since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, underscores the critical role cloud services play in modern society. Cybersecurity experts noted the difficulty users face in pinpointing issues with such large-scale disruptions, with concerns raised about potential cyber threats, given the outage’s extensive reach and impact.