Amazon reveals cause of AWS outage that took everything from banks to smart beds offline

Platforms including Signal, Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, as well as services such as banking sites and the Ring doorbell company, were some of the 2,000 companies affected by the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday. Photo: AP/Kiichiro Sato

Amazon has revealed the cause of this week’s hours-long Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which took everything from Signal to smart beds offline, was a bug in automation software that had widespread consequences.

In a lengthy outline of the cause of the outage, AWS revealed a cascading set of events brought down thousands of websites and apps that host their services with the company.