Amazon said its cloud computing service was recovering from a major outage that disrupted online activity around the world on Monday.
The service provides remote computing services to many apps, websites, governments, universities and companies. Users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many others, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Even Amazon’s own services weren’t immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren’t working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on the site where it provides updates that services in its eastern U.S. region were disrupted and engineers were working to understand what was causing the problem.
But at 5:27 a.m. EDT, AWS began reporting progress, saying, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery.”
A little more than a half-hour later, it said, “We continue to observe recovery across most” of the affected services.
The recovery was echoed by other companies reliant on AWS, with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase posting at 5:33 a.m. that some of its users gaining access to the service after it had been unavailable due to the AWS outage. “All funds are safe,” Coinbase had noted earlier.
Many sites and apps tracked by Downdetector were showing significant reductions in reported issues at about 6:15 a.m. EDT.
And at 6:35 a.m. EDT, AWS said, “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” but said some requests might be slowed “while we work toward full resolution.”
Just before 7 a.m. EDT, that AWS site simply said, “No recent issues.”
Then, at 7:08 a.m. EDT AWS said it was “continuing to work towards full recovery” of various services.
AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
“The world now runs on the cloud” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.
And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
