Amazon outage ‘resolved’ as Snapchat, banks among sites affected
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday it had resolved a massive outage that left some of the world’s largest websites offline for much of the day.
More than 1,000 apps and websites – including social media platforms like Snapchat and banks like Lloyds and Halifax – were affected by problems that Amazon said were at the heart of the cloud computing giant’s US operations.
Outage monitoring platform Downdetector said user reports of problems globally rose to more than 11 million during the outage on Monday.
Even after Amazon fixed the underlying problem, experts said the outage showed the dangers of so many companies relying on a single dominant provider.
“What this episode has highlighted is how interdependent our infrastructure is,” said Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey.
“Many online services rely on third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur even with the largest third-party providers. Small errors, often caused by humans, can have a wide and significant impact,” he added.
The problems appear to have started around 7am on Monday, as users began reporting problems accessing a range of platforms.
This included a wide range of sites and services, from massive online games like Fortnite to language learning app Duolingo.
Earlier in the day, Downdetector told the BBC it had seen more than four million reports from users on 500 sites in just a few hours – more than double the amount it would see during a normal weekday.
These later peaked at more than 11 million, it said, as more services, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, struggled to recover.
Around 11 p.m., Amazon said all AWS services were “back to normal operations.”
But not before the company had to slow down parts of its system to address the root problem.
A new “cascading” series of “faults” may have occurred after the initial outage, according to Mike Chapple, a professor of information technology at the University of Notre Dame.
“It’s like when you have a large-scale power outage. Crews start working to get it back up and running. The power may go out multiple times,” he explained, but it’s possible that Amazon initially “just addressed the symptoms” and not the cause, Chapple said.