Amazon's AWS struggles to recover after major outage disrupts apps, services worldwide

Amazon's AMZN.O cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.

The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.

After about eight hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 12:00 p.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services.

AWS was down for more than 7,800 users as of 11:46 a.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET.

"We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said in the latest update on its status page.

The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network."

EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required.

While some apps like Reddit RDDT.N and Roblox RBLX.N had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat SNAP.N, PayPal's PYPL.O Venmo and Duolingo DUOL.O, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.

ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES

AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's MSFT.O Azure and Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google Cloud.

Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms - ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems - that rely on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.

According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.

Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

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Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.

Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances seen at around 7:00 a.m. ET.

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase COIN.O and trading app Robinhood HOOD.O all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.

Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.

Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber UBER.N rival Lyft LYFT.O was also knocked down in the United States.

In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.

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In Britain, Lloyd Bank LLOY.L, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone VOD.L and BT BT.L were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website.

The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.

"The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science.

While there has been no indication of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation.

"When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos.

"AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset."

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