Amazon Web Services outage hitting platforms around world 'showing signs of recovery'

Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo among platforms affected after problems at cloud provider AWS

Screengrab of the website for Amazon Alexa. Picture: PA

A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon’s cloud computing service.

The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.

By 10.30am Irish time, Amazon was reporting that the problem, which first emerged at about 8am, was being resolved as (Amazon Web Services) AWS was “seeing significant signs of recovery”. 

Referring to the US east coast region, at 11am it added: “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.” 

Amazon reported that the problem originated in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides vital web infrastructure for a host of companies, which rent out space on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform.

Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am Irish time), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a region on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect appeared to hit services around the world, with the Downdetector site reporting problems with the same sites in multiple continents.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, also reported a surge in problems on Monday morning, with many of them located in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems began.

Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said the outage appeared to be an IT issue rather than a cyber-attack. AWS’s online health dashboard referred to DynamoDB, its database system that allows websites to access their data.

“When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” he said. 

“AWS has a far reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset. In this case it looks like it is an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to remedy it as an absolute priority.” 

Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation ARTICLE 19, said the outage underlined the dangers of placing too much digital infrastructure in a small number of hands.

“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies,” she said.

• The Guardian