A major incident affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to widespread internet outages, impacting hundreds of websites and applications for approximately three hours. Popular gaming, entertainment services, cryptocurrency platforms, and even major banking services were affected. AWS has announced significant signs of recovery, with most services now operational, though a backlog of requests continues to be processed.
The disruption, which began around 3 a.m. Eastern, underscored the inherent fragility of global technology infrastructure. It demonstrated how a problem within a single, widely utilized cloud service like Amazon’s can swiftly bring numerous systems worldwide to a halt, drawing parallels to a similar widespread event in July 2024 caused by a faulty update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Amazon’s engineers worked diligently to mitigate the effects and identify the root cause of the issue, which initially impacted 28 services, including those within its “US-EAST-1” region. The website DownDetector, which tracks internet outages, reported problems across a broad spectrum of sites, 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, PokemonGo, Strava, and Whatsapp.
Companies like Coinbase, the cryptocurrency platform, and the A.I. startup Perplexity publicly attributed their downtime to the AWS incident, with Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, stating, “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
The real-world impact extended to services like airline check-in counters at LaGuardia airport in New York, where kiosks and apps were down, leading to growing lines. Thankfully, airport security lines remained unaffected.
As of the latest updates, the severity of the incident has been “degraded,” and while many services are back online, users might still experience additional lags as systems clear queued requests. Messaging app Signal’s CEO, Meredith Whittaker, also confirmed their outage was related to the major AWS disruption, advising users to “Stand by.”