Amazon has resolved a widespread outage of its cloud computing service that affected internet access globally on Monday. The disruption impacted various online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms. The outage started early in the morning, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) reporting a gradual recovery throughout the day, finally returning to normal operations by 6 p.m. ET.
As a key unit of Amazon providing computing power and digital services on demand, AWS’s server disruptions can lead to outages across websites and platforms relying on its cloud infrastructure. The outage impacted social media apps like Snapchat and Reddit, causing disruptions for businesses worldwide.
The root cause of the issue was identified as an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring network load balancers. By mid-afternoon, outage tracking website Downdetector had received over 13 million reports related to the incident, with Canada alone accounting for more than 351,000 reports.
Various companies and services, including the Toronto Blue Jays, Snapchat, Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Wealthsimple, Perplexity, Coinbase, Robinhood, Slack, Trint, Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Venmo, Chime, Lyft, Signal, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and HMRC, reported being affected by the AWS outage.
The disruption underscored the critical role of AWS in the internet’s infrastructure and ecosystem, with experts warning about the reliance on a few global cloud providers for essential digital services. AWS competes with Google and Microsoft in the cloud services market, collectively dominating about 63% of the sector.
Experts emphasized the complexity and interconnectedness of digital services, emphasizing the need for diversification and resilience in cloud infrastructure. While there were no indications of a cyberattack causing the outage, the incident highlighted the vulnerability of digital services when reliant on a small number of cloud providers.