Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts the Digital World and Halts Major Platforms
A major outage of Amazon Web Services on Monday caused partial paralysis in the global digital space, disrupting thousands of widely popular websites and applications, highlighting once again the fragility of the global technological infrastructure and its reliance on a limited number of giant cloud platforms.
Signs of recovery began to appear about three hours after the crisis started, as Amazon Web Services announced in an update on its service status board that it had observed "strong indicators of recovery" for the affected services starting from6:00 AM Eastern Time (10:00 AM GMT). The company added in its statement: "Most requests should succeed now. We continue to process the backlog of pending requests."
This outage immediately reflected on user experiences around the world, as complaints spread about the inability to use communication apps like Snapchat and Reddit, entertainment platforms like Disney+, and airline services like Delta and United Airlines, whose customers reported being unable to access their bookings or complete check-in. The effects also extended to daily services like the McDonald's app, The New York Times, and banking and payment services like Venmo and Robinhood.
The commercial sectors were not the only ones affected, as official UK government websites like Gov.uk and the UK Revenue and Customs website faced similar technical difficulties, according to observations from Down Detector.
In response to the incident, a spokesperson for the UK government told CNBC: "We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services and a number of electronic services that rely on its infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company that is working to restore services as quickly as possible."
In the financial sector, Lloyds Banking Group had to ask its customers for patience after some of its services were affected, before announcing about twenty minutes later that services were gradually returning to normal.
The effects also extended to the world of online gaming, where platforms like Roblox and Fortnite experienced service difficulties, while the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase reported that many of its users were suffering from service outages.
For its part, the design platform Canva attributed its service outage to "a major issue with the primary cloud service provider," while the CEO of the AI tool Perplexity, Aravind Srinivasan, confirmed in a post on the platform X that "the root cause is an issue with AWS, and we are working to resolve it."
It is worth mentioning that this widespread outage recalls a similar incident that occurred last year affecting the systems of CrowdStrike, causing paralysis to vital technological systems in hospitals, airports, and banks. This incident comes a few months before the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 caused by a failed software update, which forced Delta Airlines alone to cancel more than 5,000 flights and incur losses exceeding $500 million.
