San Francisco, Oct 20 (AP) — Amazon announced the recovery of its cloud computing service following a significant outage that affected online activities globally on Monday.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider of remote computing services to numerous governments, universities, and companies — including The Associated Press — experienced disruptions.
Outage-tracking website DownDetector showed users reporting issues with various online platforms, such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and the online broker Robinhood, as well as the McDonald's app. Both Coinbase and Signal acknowledged on X that their problems were tied to the AWS outage.
Initial trouble signs appeared around 3:11 am Eastern Time, as AWS noted increased error rates and latencies across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region on its Health Dashboard. The situation evolved with the company observing "significant error rates" and stating that engineers were "actively working" on resolving the issue.
By around 6 am Eastern Time, AWS reported witnessing recovery in most affected services, stating, "We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered," while continuing efforts towards a "full resolution." Major global businesses and organizations make up AWS's clientele.
"With so much of the world depending on a few large cloud compute companies, any issues can have a wide-ranging impact," noted Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert with the UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
Burgess highlighted, "The world now operates on the cloud, viewing the internet as an essential utility akin to water or electricity, owing to our smartphone-driven lives." The reliance on a few cloud service providers makes it "challenging for users to identify issues, as they only see services like Snapchat or Roblox," rather than AWS.
Around 6:30 am Eastern Time, AWS announced that "most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now." (AP) SKS SKS
(Only the headline of this report may have been reworked by Editorji; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)