A widespread internet outage linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday affected a number of popular apps and online platforms, such as Snapchat, Roblox, Canva, Perplexity and the UK’s tax authority HMRC, as millions of users were left without access to regular online services.
The outage, which started at approximately 8 am UK time (12:30 pm IST), rapidly cascaded across several regions as AWS that is the largest cloud computing service provider in the world, saw "increased error rates" and response delays in its US-East-1 region which is one of its primary data centers.
Services across social media, gaming and banking platforms were affected. Customers of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers described being unable to access their internet banking websites, while services such as Duolingo, Ring doorbell and Fortnite also suffered extended outages.
What is the reason of the downtime?
Amazon reported that it had identified a "potential root cause" involving DNS resolution for its DynamoDB API, a key database service, and said engineers were "actively working to mitigate the issue."
AWS, which hosts an enormous percentage of worldwide web infrastructure, offers cloud computers and computing power to hundreds of large companies. Any outage of its services tends to send shockwaves throughout the digital community, even for platforms not owned by Amazon.
Although rumors of a potential cyber-attack were circulating on social media, security officials and AWS officials indicated that there had been no signs yet of any malicious action. The firm insisted that the issue seemed to be the result of an internal technical glitch.
The disruption reignited concerns regarding the fragility of the internet’s backbone, which relies more and more on a handful of cloud hosts like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
As of press time, Amazon engineers were working to restore normal operations back online, but no specific timeframe for a full recovery had been announced.
