Gambiaj.com – (London, U.K.) – A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of the US tech giant, disrupted digital services worldwide on Monday morning, leaving millions of users unable to access popular platforms and government websites.
The disruption stemmed from AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, one of the company’s largest and most widely used data hubs. Amazon confirmed “an increase in error rates and latency across multiple services,” which affected websites and applications across the globe.
According to monitoring site Downdetector, the problems began around 9:00 a.m. Central European Time, with sharp spikes in complaints from users of Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Fortnite, and Amazon’s Alexa service. The UK Treasury website was also reported to be impacted.
AWS engineers quickly acknowledged the issue, saying they were working to “identify the cause and implement mitigation measures.” Hours later, the company said it had resolved the underlying problem, though it warned users of lingering disruptions as services recovered.
“Some services may continue to experience delays because requests made before and during the outage need to be processed,” AWS noted, likening the situation to a backlog of messages that suddenly flood a system.
The outage also affected the launch of new EC2 instances, Amazon’s virtual servers that host websites and applications.
An earlier update suggested the problem was tied to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-East-1 region. DNS, often described as the “phone book of the internet,” converts website names into numeric IP addresses that computers use to locate servers. Any disruption in this process can prevent browsers from finding online content.
Technology reporter Shiona McCallum of the BBC said the outage underscores the risks of global dependency on a handful of massive data hubs. “Today’s outage stemmed from Amazon’s US-East-1 region in Virginia, on the East Coast of the US. This is the tech giant’s original and largest location for its web services, and there are a lot of data centers there,” she explained.
“But because of its age, size, and amount of on-demand capacity, it is prone to outages. This also highlights the huge challenge with so many businesses depending on single cloud computing regions from single providers.”
The incident is the latest reminder of the fragility of internet infrastructure and the cascading impact of outages at major cloud providers, which host services for companies and governments worldwide.
