A massive outage on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), disrupted dozens of popular websites and applications across the world on Monday, October 20.
The outage, which began around 3:11 a.m. ET (7:11 a.m. GMT), caused widespread connection failures and slowdowns for several hours. According to Amazon’s official service dashboard, the disruption affected the US-EAST-1 region, one of AWS’s key data hubs that supports many international services.
Apps and websites affected
The outage temporarily knocked out or slowed access to major platforms including Snapchat, Signal, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood, and several online banking services in the UK and Europe. Some websites hosted on AWS were also unreachable or loaded intermittently.
In a statement, AWS said it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies” affecting multiple services but confirmed by 6:30 a.m. ET that “most systems were back online.”
No sign of cyberattack
Amazon has not reported any evidence of a cyberattack, suggesting instead that the issue stemmed from a technical fault or DNS routing problem within its servers.
Technology experts say the incident highlights the heavy reliance on a handful of cloud providers to power the global internet.
“When one major provider like AWS experiences a problem, the ripple effect can be felt across industries and continents,” said one cybersecurity analyst quoted by The Guardian.
Background
AWS, which hosts cloud infrastructure for millions of businesses and public institutions worldwide, has suffered similar disruptions in the past. However, Monday’s outage ranks among the most significant in recent years due to its scale and impact on social media, gaming, and financial apps.
As of Monday afternoon, Amazon said all systems were “operating normally,” though some users continued to experience minor delays as services stabilized.
