A huge outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has knocked out many of the world's biggest websites and apps on Monday. Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom and Roblox are among hundreds of sites hit, as well as Lloyds and Halifax banks, the UK's National Rail and HMRC. A leader in the cloud infrastructure market, Amazon Web Services make the infrastructure underpinning millions of large companies' websites and platforms. The issue began shortly after midnight PDT in AWS' main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. A notice on AWS' status page said it was experiencing DNS problems with DynamoDB, its database service that underpins many other AWS applications. DNS, or Domain Name System, translates website names to IP addresses so browsers and other applications can load. AWS cited an "operational issue" affecting "multiple services" and said it was "working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery," in an update at 2:01 a.m. PDT. More than 70 of its own services were affected. Shortly afterward, AWS said it was seeing "significant signs of recovery." By 3:35 a.m. PDT, the issue had been "fully mitigated," AWS said in an update, adding that most AWS service operations "are succeeding normally now." "Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution," it said, noting some services were continuing to work through a backlog. British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs were also experiencing issues, per Downdetector. A government spokesperson told CNBC: "We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible." Lloyds Banking Group confirmed some of its services were affected and asked customers "to bear with us" while it works to restore them. Some 20 minutes later, it added that services were coming back online. Reddit, too, is "working on scaling Reddit back to 100 percent as we speak," a spokesperson said. Some United and Delta customers reported on social media that they couldn't find their reservations online, check in or drop bags. Other social media users cited disruption across cloud-based games, including Roblox and Fortnite, while crypto exchange Coinbase said many users were unable to access the service due to the outage. Graphic design tool Canva said it was "experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva. There is a major issue with our underlying cloud provider." Generative AI search tool Perplexity is also affected. "The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it," CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X. It's not the first time major companies have been affected by a technical issue; in July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike revealed just how fragile global technology infrastructure is when it caused Microsoft Windows systems to go dark, creating millions of dollars worth of chaos and grounding thousands of flights in the process. It also affected hospitals and banks. "There's no sign that this AWS outage was caused by a cyber attack — it looks like a technical fault affecting one of Amazon's main data centres," Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity company NymVPN said in a statement. "These issues can happen when systems become overloaded or a key part of the network goes down, and because so many websites and apps rely on AWS, the impact spreads quickly." "This incident is a reminder that cybersecurity isn't only about defending against threats — it's also about resilience. Businesses should plan for technical failures as seriously as they do for cyber attacks, ensuring they have redundancy, backup systems, and multi-cloud strategies to keep services running when the unexpected happens," he added. Indeed, "DynamoDB isn't a term that most consumers know," Mike Chapple, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business and former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said in a statement. However, it "is one of the record-keepers of the modern Internet." "We'll learn more in the hours and days ahead but early reports indicate that this wasn't actually a problem with the database itself. The data appears to be safe. Instead, something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data," he added. "This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold." — Agencies
