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Amazon cloud services restored worldwide; outage affected several services for hours
A major technical outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted internet services worldwide. Social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms were affected. The company restored service after several hours of work.
A significant technical shutdown at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which started Monday morning, disrupted internet users globally. Online social media, internet gaming, streaming services, food delivery companies, and online financial services were offline for several hours. Amazon said it had fixed the problem by evening.
The firm reported in its AWS Health Tracker that "services were back to normal" at 6 p.m. Following the around three-hour blackout, AWS recovery started, albeit full restoration took a day.
Amazon stated that the issue was caused by a glitch in the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website addresses into IP addresses on the internet. This made it difficult to access websites and apps. According to the online outage tracker DownDetector, over 11 million complaints were filed from more than 2,500 companies. Affected services included popular services like Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Netflix, Disney+, the McDonald's app, Coinbase, Signal, and Robinhood.
Many of Amazon's own services were also affected. Users faced difficulties accessing Alexa smart speakers, Ring doorbell cameras, Kindle e-book downloads, and the Amazon website. The education sector was also affected. The Canvas learning platform used in many schools and colleges went down, preventing students and teachers from submitting or accessing online assignments. Ohio State University in the US emailed its 70,000 students, asking them to make alternative arrangements.
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This isn't the first time AWS has experienced a major outage. In 2023, an outage also affected many online services. The largest outage occurred in 2021, lasting five hours and disrupting airlines, auto dealers, payment apps, and streaming services.
According to cybersecurity experts, the outage was a normal technical glitch, not a cyberattack. Patrick Burgess, an expert with the UK-based IT organization BCS, said, "The world today is running on cloud technology, and when such platforms experience issues, it impacts many services."
He explained that cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have well-established processes for handling such situations. Typically, such problems are resolved "within hours, not days."
