An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has led to widespread disruptions across various sectors globally. This event has particularly impacted a multitude of users, including governments, educational institutions, and corporations, among them The Associated Press. Popular platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and the Robinhood brokerage app reported substantial service interruptions, as documented by DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages. Additionally, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and communication service Signal confirmed on X that their functionalities were compromised due to the ongoing AWS issues.
The initial signs of the disruption began at approximately 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when AWS announced via its Health Dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Shortly after, the company acknowledged “significant error rates” and communicated that its engineers were actively addressing the problem.
Approximately two hours following the onset of the issues, AWS provided an update indicating that preliminary mitigations had been implemented. The company subsequently reported that it was observing “significant signs of recovery,” suggesting that the majority of requests were beginning to succeed again. However, AWS cautioned that they were still in the process of managing a backlog of queued requests, which indicates lingering effects of the outage.
The repercussions of such outages can be profound, especially given the reliance of many industries on a handful of major cloud computing services for their infrastructure needs. Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, emphasized the gravity of the situation, noting that the world’s dependence on just a few cloud computing companies makes disruptions like this particularly detrimental. The ripple effects of AWS outages can disrupt diverse online services, underlining the vulnerabilities inherent in cloud-computing dependent systems.
