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Amazon says AWS cloud service back to normal after massive global outage
The AWS outage disrupted hundreds of websites and apps, including Venmo, Robinhood Markets Inc. and Apple Inc.’s Apple Music and Apple TV.
Amazon.com announced on Monday afternoon that its cloud services had returned to normal after a widespread internet outage disrupted thousands of websites worldwide, including major platforms such as Snapchat and Reddit.
However, the company said certain AWS services were still dealing with a backlog of messages that could take a few more hours to clear.
AWS hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, and the disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. Users on Monday afternoon had complained of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom, news agency Reuters reported.
Since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction, it was reportedly the largest internet disruption.
It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.
Domain Name System
The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data.
Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers.
The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network", Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.
Shortly after 3 p.m. PT (2200 GMT), Amazon said, "all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours."
The outage, caused by a database network issue, disrupted hundreds of websites and apps, including Venmo, Robinhood Markets Inc. and Apple Inc.’s Apple Music and Apple TV.
DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies. Users reported trouble with the social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, the online broker Robinhood and the McDonald's app, as well as Netflix, Disney and many other services.
The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Signal chat app both said on X that they were experiencing trouble related to the outage.
Amazon's own services were also affected. Users of the company's Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working.
(With inputs from Reuters, AP)
