SINGAPORE: Amazon’s cloud computing division AWS experienced a major global outage on Monday that disrupted thousands of websites and popular applications worldwide.
The widespread disruption affected platforms including Snapchat, Reddit, PayPal’s Venmo and various banking services across multiple countries.
After approximately three hours of service interruptions, AWS reported “significant signs of recovery” for some impacted services in a status update.
“We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,“ the company stated on its official status page.
Ookla, which operates outage tracking website Downdetector, reported over 4 million user complaints during the incident.
Snapchat recorded more than 22,000 outage reports at its peak, while Roblox experienced over 12,600 user reports of service disruption.
Other affected platforms included financial services from Chime, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and trading app Robinhood, all attributing issues to AWS infrastructure problems.
Amazon’s own services including its shopping platform, Prime Video and Alexa were also impacted by the outage.
In Britain, Lloyd’s Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone and BT services experienced disruptions, along with the UK tax authority HMRC’s website.
Software engineer and cyber expert Junade Ali identified the issue as relating to one of AWS’s networking systems controlling a database product.
“As this issue can usually be resolved centrally... the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours,“ Ali explained.
The disruption highlights the vulnerability of interconnected digital services that rely heavily on a small number of global cloud providers.
“The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,“ said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Research at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science.
Cybersecurity firm Sophos noted that while there was no indication of a cyberattack, the scale of disruption naturally raised concerns.
“AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset,“ said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos. – Reuters
