A significant outage originating from Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading provider of cloud computing services, caused widespread disruption across the internet for approximately three hours on Monday. Hundreds of websites and applications, including popular gaming, entertainment, and financial services, experienced downtime before AWS announced “significant signs of recovery.”
The incident began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern time, with Amazon reporting that most services were back online by 5:27 a.m. However, the company noted that a backlog of queued requests might still cause additional processing time for some services to fully recover.
This event serves as a stark reminder of the global technology infrastructure’s delicate nature. A problem with a single, widely used service like Amazon’s cloud operations can ripple across the digital world, bringing systems to a halt. This fragility was also notably exposed in July 2024 when a faulty update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to similar widespread issues.
During the disruption, Amazon’s engineers worked diligently to identify the cause and mitigate the impact. The company confirmed that 28 of its services, particularly those in the “US-EAST-1” region, were experiencing issues. The online outage tracker, DownDetector, reported a surge of problems for dozens of major platforms including Amazon itself, Venmo, Hulu, McDonald’s, Coinbase, Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Zoom, Lloyd’s Bank, Bank of Scotland, Signal, Gov.uk, Wordle, Slack, Canva, Fortnite, Tidal, Duolingo, Microsoft365, Pokémon Go, Strava, and WhatsApp.
Companies reliant on AWS quickly acknowledged the issues. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency platform, posted on X (formerly Twitter): “We’re aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage. Our team is working on the issue and we’ll provide updates here. All funds are safe.” Similarly, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of the A.I. startup Perplexity, confirmed, “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” Meredith Whittaker, CEO of the messaging app Signal, also informed users on X that Signal was affected and related to the major AWS outage.
The impact extended beyond digital services, with physical operations also feeling the effects. At LaGuardia Airport in New York, lines grew at airline check-in counters as kiosks and apps became non-functional. Fortunately, airport security lines did not experience any technical difficulties.
By mid-morning, reports from DownDetector indicated that disruptions were easing across numerous sites, including Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, and the British government’s website, showing fewer reported issues.