Internet services cut for hours by Amazon cloud outage
A huge spike in disruption logged at Downdetector early Monday was followed by an even bigger jump some nine hours later, with the internet trouble tracker posting that it had received more than 11 million reports in total.
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Popular internet services, from streaming platforms to messaging services to banking, were offline for hours Monday due to an outage in Amazon's crucial cloud network, spotlighting how dependent internet life has become on the tech titan.
A huge spike in disruption logged at Downdetector early Monday was followed by an even bigger jump some nine hours later, with the internet trouble tracker posting that it had received more than 11 million reports in total.
In an update at 1822 GMT, Amazon said "mitigations to resolve launch failures" were progressing, linking a "load balancer health" issue to ongoing Amazon Web Services (AWS) connectivity troubles.
The disruption affected streaming platforms, including Amazon's Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat and Duolingo.
Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and Whatsapp were affected in Europe, according to Downdetector.
Some UK banks such as Lloyd's were also impacted, and pointed to AWS as the problem.
AWS handles nearly a third of the planet's cloud infrastructure market, powering millions of apps and websites around the world.
Its maintenance site said engineers scrambled to fix a DNS issue once they became aware at 0711 GMT of "increased error rates" hitting multiple services. It was resolved, but caused a huge backlog of stymied requests that had to be worked through.
More than 10 hours later, AWS said it was still working to get the cloud computing system running smoothly.
"The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," Amazon said in a status update.
The outage showed "how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet, for many of the online services we more or less take for granted," said financial analyst Michael Hewson.
"On an economic level it's almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket."
Cloud leader
AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft Azure, and with Google Cloud in third place. Businesses, governments and consumers around the world rely on their infrastructure for online activities.
The British government's websites were among those affected by Monday's outage, according to Downdetector, which relies on users to signal online problems they encounter.
"Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally," said Emarketer senior analyst Jacob Bourne.
"As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder."
In July 2024, another global online outage occurred when a US cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, issued a faulty update to its software used by airports, hospitals and many organizations.
According to Microsoft, some 8.5 million devices were affected, resulting in a systems crash and users being confronted with a "blue screen of death."
