Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working to recover after a massive outage Monday disrupted thousands of websites, apps, airlines and more worldwide.
The outage began early Monday in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, home to much of the company’s cloud infrastructure, which is crucial infrastructure for thousands of sites and services. The same region has experienced major outages in past years.
The disruption impacted Amazon’s own services and countless clients that depend on its cloud network. Outages include Snapchat, Reddit, Delta, United Airlines, Venmo and Coinbase. Downdetector recorded millions of reports as sites and apps went down throughout the morning.
The problem stemmed from an internal subsystem tied to AWS’s EC2 service, which provides virtual server capacity for businesses worldwide. AWS said the failure affected multiple services, creating elevated error rates and network instability.
While Amazon reported early signs of EC2 recovery by midday, connectivity problems persisted across a range of websites and apps. Amazon warehouse employees reported that internal tools went offline too. Amazon’s Seller Central platform and employee payment app were also hit.
The scope of the outage points to a larger flaw in the system: websites, systems and apps across the entire globe rely on just a handful of cloud providers. So, when one of them goes down, it has worldwide effect. With AWS being so massive, analysts said the financial impact could reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the UK, banks, telecom providers and government websites also experienced outages. Across the U.S., airlines, payment systems and AI platforms were disrupted.
Many have speculated the outage is a result of a massive cyber attack, but there is no evidence to such claims at this point. AWS continues to apply fixes and monitor the network for further instability.
The New Jersey Digest is a new jersey magazine that has chronicled daily life in the Garden State for over 10 years.