AWS outage disrupts thousands of websites, apps, services
A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has disrupted online services globally, affecting platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Reddit and multiple enterprise tools that depend on AWS cloud infrastructure.
Some 2,000 websites, apps, banking services have reported problems according to downdetector.com, including well-known brands outside the tech space, such as Starbucks and McDonalds.
AWS reported the issue is centred on its US-EAST-1 region, the scale of disruption shows how heavily businesses worldwide including in Ireland rely on a small number of cloud providers for critical operations.
According to the AWS Health Dashboard, problems appeared at 12:11am PDT in the US where the company revealed it was investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
A Dashboard post said AWS had noticed problems with case creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API; significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint; and a warning that global services or features relying on US-EAST-1 endpoints may also be experiencing issues.
By 2:22am PDT AWS was reporting significant progress in finding a resolution, progressing to a full mitigation by 3:35am PDT. Customers have been asked to flush DNS caches if errors persist.
“This doesn’t appear to be a cyber attack but a glitch – similar to last year’s CrowdStrike outage,” said Dr Aybars Tuncdogan, a reader in Digital Innovation and Information Security at Kings College London. “The impact is similar and exposes a critical single point of failure. If a comparable vulnerability were deliberately targeted by malicious actors, the damage would be far worse.
“The deeper issue is tech monoculture. We are building global infrastructure with very little diversity in platforms or providers. That’s why we are seeing systemic failures: Amazon Web Services now, a multi-airport outage a few weeks ago, CrowdStrike last year. It’s like agricultural monoculture – when everything relies on a single strain, one disease can wipe out entire plantations, because they all have the same genetics.”
Reaction on social media has been a mix of humour and frustration. On X users posted jokes about new AWS employees enjoying their first day, to more pointed commentary from Elon Musk, who simply posted “X works”.
Users also reported problems with AIs Perplexity and Claude.
Also posting on X, CEO of Carlow-based Blacknight Solutions Michele Neylon echoed Dr Tuncdogan: “Here’s the problem: The Internet is held together with sticky tape. Its weaknesses are its strengths and it was designed to route its way around problems. BUT Over the past +/- 10 years oodles of “stuff” has become reliant on a handful of HUGE tech providers. Today shows this.”
According to the Irish Independent, Ireland appears to have been largely unaffected with only Ticketmaster, Autodesk and publisher Folens showing issues.
“When one of the major cloud platforms goes down, it reminds everyone how interconnected modern business systems have become,” said George Foley, technical advisor at Eset Ireland.
“Even if your own website or app isn’t hosted on AWS, there’s a good chance something you use from your CRM to your payment processor is. Outages like this highlight the importance of having resilience plans in place, including backups and alternative routes for essential data and services.”
Downdetector.com has published a list of high-profile organisations affected by the incident:
• Amazon
• Amazon Alexa
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Prime Video
• Amazon Web Services
• Ancestry
• Asana
• Atlassian
• Bank Of Scotland
• Blink Security
• BT
• Canva
• Clash Of Clans
• Clash Royale
• Coinbase
• Dead By Daylight
• Duolingo
• EE
• Epic Games Store
• Eventbrite
• Flickr
• Fortnite
• Government Gateway services (including HMRC)
• Halifax
• Hargreaves Lansdown
• Hay Day
• Hinge
• HMRC
• IMDB
• Jira Software
• Just Eat
• Life360
• Lloyds Bank
• Microsoft 365
• My Fitness Pal
• Ocado
• Peloton
• Perplexity AI
• Playstation Network
• Pokemon Go
• Rainbow Six
• Reddit
• Ring
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• Signal
• Sky Mobile
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Snapchat
• Strava
• Square
• Tidal
• WhatsApp
• Wordle
• Xero
• Zoom
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