Amazon announced that a massive outage of its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was resolved as of Monday evening IST, following a problem that severely disrupted internet use around the world. The issue took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms.
The all-day disruption and the widespread exasperation it caused served as the latest reminder that 21st-century society is overwhelmingly dependent on just a handful of companies for much of its internet technology, which appears reliable until it suddenly breaks down.
Timeline of the recovery
The first signs of trouble emerged at around 1:41 PM IST (3:11 AM Eastern time), when AWS reported on its "health dashboard" that it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region". Later, the company reported "significant error rates" and confirmed that engineers were "actively working" on the problem.
About three hours after the outage began in afternoon, AWS said it was starting to recover. However, it wasn't until 4:30 AM IST on Tuesday (6 PM Eastern time on Monday) that services returned to normal operations, according to a statement posted on Amazon's AWS health website, where it tracks outages.
The cause and technical details
Amazon officially attributed the outage to issues related to its Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS is responsible for converting web addresses (like amazon.com) into IP addresses (numeric designations that identify locations on the internet), which are essential for websites and apps to load on connected devices.
Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said that a "slow and bumpy recovery process" is "entirely normal." As engineers roll out fixes across the cloud computing infrastructure, the process could trigger smaller disruptions, he noted. Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, explained, "It's similar to what happens after a large-scale power outage: While a city's power is coming back online, neighbourhoods may see intermittent glitches as crews finish the repairs".
Sixty-four internal AWS services were ultimately affected, the company said.
Widespread impact
AWS provides the behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure for some of the world's biggest organizations, including government departments, universities, businesses, and news agencies such as The Associated Press.
The disruption led to widespread user reports of trouble across thousands of companies. DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies.
Affected services included:
- Social Media: Snapchat, Coinbase, and the Signal chat app.
- Gaming: Roblox and Fortnite.
- Streaming/Delivery: Netflix, Disney+, and the McDonald's app.
- Education: Canvas, a widely used educational platform, was knocked out, preventing many college and K-12 students from submitting or accessing homework and course materials.
- Amazon Services: Users reported that Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers were non-functional, and some were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.
Historical context
This is not the first time AWS issues have caused widespread disruptions. Many popular internet services were affected by a brief outage in 2023. AWS's longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when a wide range of companies were affected for more than five hours. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017.
Because the world's internet plumbing relies on just a few companies, "when there's an issue like this, it can be really impactful" across many online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. He added that the good news is that these issues are typically resolved in "hours rather than days" and rarely point to a malicious cyberattack.
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