A major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) has caused serious problems in the work of hundreds of websites and online services around the world. Within a few hours, thousands of users reported being unable to use platforms such as Amazon.com, Alexa, Ring, Amazon Prime Video, Snapchat, Zoom, Reddit, The Wall Street Journal, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva. The problem even affected financial applications such as Venmo, Robinhood, Chime and Coinbase.
According to Downdetector, most of the difficulties were localized in the US-East-1 region, where Amazon's key data center in Northern Virginia is located - a critical node for the global internet infrastructure. More than 14,000 users have reported problems just for Amazon.com, and over 6,000 have reported outages in AWS. The most affected are mobile applications (53%), home pages (26%) and shopping functions (22%).
The official AWS status page confirmed an increased frequency of errors and delays in cloud services in North Virginia, including for Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2). The company assures that it is actively working to resolve the problem and clarify the root cause, but does not announce when full functionality will be restored.
Experts comment that it is most likely an internal technical error, and not a large-scale cyberattack. At the moment, there is no evidence of security breaches or data leaks. The AWS outage clearly shows how critical infrastructure for the world wide web are Amazon's cloud services.