The extent to which digital life depends on the tech giant is demonstrated by the fact that popular internet services, including banking, messaging, and streaming platforms, were unavailable for hours on Monday due to an outage in Amazon’s vital cloud network.
Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat, Duolingo, and streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video were also impacted by the disturbance.
In Europe, Downdetector reported that Signal and WhatsApp messaging apps as well as mobile phone services were impacted.
People also reported problems reaching websites including Amazon’s own e-commerce shop.
Some banks such as Lloyd’s were also impacted, and pointed to AWS as the problem.
On a status page, Amazon stated that the system was returning to “pre-event levels” and estimated that it would take two hours to clear the backlog of data that the issue had caused.
At DownDetector, reports of AWS issues fell sharply but persisted.
Early on Monday, Downdetector recorded a massive rise in disruption. Nine hours later, the internet issue tracker reported that it had received over 11 million reports overall.
Amazon stated in an update that “mitigations were applied to resolve launch failures,” attributing the issue to a “load balancer health” issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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 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.”
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