AWS services recover after daylong outage hits major sites

Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday that shut down several major sites.

However, many sites were back online within a few hours Downdetector Another spike in user reports around noon ET showed outages for Amazon, AWS, and Alexa.

Company Latest update at 6:53 PM ET until “all AWS services have returned to normal operations” shortly after 6 PM ET.

AWS said some services are still experiencing a backlog of messages that will finish processing in the next few hours.

“We will share a detailed post-event summary for AWS,” the company said in the note.

The update came after outages and delays continued into Monday afternoon, with the company noting “increased error rates” for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, the popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.

“We are working to fully restore service as quickly as possible,” the company wrote at the time.

At around 1:30 PM ET, AWS said it was starting to see “early signs” of EC2 recovery in some regions and that it was applying fixes to the remaining regions “at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside.”

Amazon also confirmed that the outage affected Amazon.com, some of its affiliates, and AWS customer support operations.

The outage was first reported at 3:11 a.m. ET in AWS’s main US East region located in Northern Virginia. A notice on the AWS status page indicated that it was experiencing DNS issues with DynamoDB, its database service that supports many other AWS applications.

DNS, or Domain Name System, translates website names into 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 tracks to speed up the recovery process,” in an update at 5:01 a.m. ET. More than 70 of its services were affected.

AWS said in an update at 6:35 a.m. ET that the DNS issue has been “fully mitigated” and that AWS service operations are “succeeding normally.”

AWS is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for about a third of the market, ahead of Microsoft and Google, according to Synergy Research Group. Millions of businesses and organizations rely on AWS for cloud computing services, such as servers and storage.

Downdetector showed user reports indicating problems with sites including Disney+, Lyftthe McDonald’s program, New York Times, RedditThe doorbell rang, robinhood, Snapchat, United AirlinesT-Mobile and Venmo.

British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs also experienced issues, according to Downdetector.

A government spokesperson told CNBC: “We are aware of the incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and the many online services that rely on its infrastructure. Through our incident response arrangements in place, we are in contact with the company, which is working to restore services as quickly as possible.”

Lloyds Banking Group confirmed that some of its services were affected and asked customers to “bear with us” while it works to restore them. After about 20 minutes, she added that services were back online.

The outage also disrupted important tools within Amazon. Warehouse and delivery employees, as well as drivers for Amazon Flex, I mentioned On Reddit Internal systems were offline in many locations. Some warehouse workers were directed to stand in break rooms and loading areas during their shift, while they were unable to load Amazon’s Anytime Pay app, which allows employees to access a portion of their paychecks instantly.

Seller Central, the hub that Amazon’s third-party sellers use to manage their businesses, also stopped working due to the outage.

Reddit is also “working to scale Reddit back to 100 percent as we speak,” a Reddit spokesperson told CNBC.

Some united and Delta Airlines Customers reported on social media that they were unable to find their reservations online, Check in or drop off bags.

A T-Mobile spokesperson said its customers experienced issues when trying to use other sites or services due to the AWS outage, but that “there was no outage or outage in service” at the carrier.

Canvas, an online learning platform used to host course information and submit assignments, He said I also had an “ongoing AWS incident”.

Other social media users noted outages for cloud-based games, including Roblox and Fortnite, while cryptocurrency 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 impacting functionality in Canva. There is a significant issue with our primary cloud provider.”

The generative AI search tool Perplexity was also affected. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We are working on it,” X CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.

This is not the first time in modern history that major companies have been affected by a technical problem. In July 2024, A.J Faulty software upgrade Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike exposed the fragility of the world’s technology infrastructure when it caused Microsoft Windows systems to crash, causing millions of dollars in chaos and thousands of canceled flights in the process. It also affected hospitals and banks.

AWS has also seen other outages in recent years. disorder In 2023 It caused many websites to stop working for several hours, while the outage was more severe In 2021 Affected websites and services around the world, including some Amazon deliveries, which were briefly halted.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have long competed to claim enterprise customers. after interruption From Microsoft’s productivity software suite earlier this month, Google He sought to take advantage On the expiration of the service by offering its own tools and business continuity plan running its workspace service in parallel with Microsoft 365.

In a blog post last week, Google wrote: “Just because Microsoft 365 is down — and it’s a question of when and for how long, not if — doesn’t mean your teams need to go back to using pen and paper.”

Google cloud services hostel For an extended period in June, disrupting several major providers such as OpenAI and Shopify. Company He said The outage was caused by multiple layers of faulty recent updates.

Monday’s AWS outage did not appear to be caused by a cyberattack, but was likely “a technical error affecting one of Amazon’s major data centers,” Rob Jardine, chief digital officer at cybersecurity firm NymVPN, said in a statement.

“These issues can occur when systems become overloaded or a major part of the network goes down, and since many websites and applications rely on AWS, the impact spreads quickly,” he added.

An Amazon spokesperson pointed to AWS’s Service Health Dashboard when reached for comment.

“DynamoDB is not a term most consumers are familiar with,” Mike Chappell, a professor of information technology at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business and a former NSA computer scientist, said in a statement. However, he is “one of the record keepers of the modern Internet.”

He added: “We will learn more in the coming hours and days, but early reports suggest that this was not actually a problem with the database itself. The data appears to be safe. Instead, something went wrong with the logs that tell other systems where to find their data.”

“This episode is a reminder of how dependent the world is on a few big cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one big cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.”

— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that there is no service outage at T-Mobile.