A widespread outage affecting popular applications and websites globally highlighted the critical reliance of modern digital services on a few major cloud providers, following a significant disruption to Amazon Web Services.
Users worldwide reported issues with services including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, and several banking platforms. This marked a significant disruption across the digital landscape.
The platform Down Detector, which tracks outages, registered over 4 million problem reports globally. This figure more than doubled the typical 1.8 million reports received on a normal weekday.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) acknowledged “increased error rates for connectivity” and “delays across several services.” The problems were concentrated in its US East 1 region.
AWS specifically noted issues with its DynamoDB database service in US-EAST-1. The company suggested these problems might be linked to system DNS connection failures.
User reports about AWS issues began arriving around 6:56 AM UTC. By 8:50 AM UTC, hundreds of companies were reporting service disruptions linked to the platform.
The widespread outage persisted for over 90 minutes. Amazon confirmed its engineering teams were actively working to resolve the issue and investigate its root cause.
AWS, launched in 2006, serves as a fundamental component of modern internet infrastructure. It provides cloud services and servers to thousands of companies worldwide.
The platform competes directly with services like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It represents one of Amazon’s primary revenue streams.
This incident underscores the inherent vulnerability of the global internet infrastructure. It highlights the significant dependence on a small number of large cloud providers to power the worldwide digital economy.