Major Outage Hits Online Services
Hundreds of online services across North America and Europe were temporarily taken offline on Monday morning. The problem was suspected to be related to an outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in North Virginia. This outage had a significant impact on various websites and apps, including those used for entertainment, communication, and banking.
Affected Services
In addition to Amazon services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Alexa, numerous other websites and apps suffered from problems. Some of the affected services included Signal, Life360, Roblox, Zoom, Fortnite, IMDb, and Disney+. The issue was not limited to entertainment and media sites, as several banking sites were also affected. These included Britain’s Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank, and Halifax, as well as the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase.
Cause of the Outage
The exact cause of the outage has yet to be determined, but it is believed to be related to a major outage at an AWS facility in Northern Virginia. AWS first reported "increased error rates and latency for multiple AWS services" shortly after midnight (PT). The company stated that the issue was ongoing and that engineers were working to resolve the problem and understand its root cause.
Impact on Users
The problem first came to light when people in Europe woke up to find that several websites and apps were not working. Monitoring sites like Downdetector began reporting a spike in issues for multiple sites and apps around 8am UK time (midnight PT). The incident caused significant disruptions to users, who were unable to access their favorite services. Fortunately, Coinbase issued a statement saying that all funds were safe, which helped to alleviate some concerns.
Comparison to Previous Outages
The incident is reminiscent of an outage at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in July 2024, which affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide. That outage disrupted airlines, banks, and government services, with an estimated total cost of $10 billion. While the current outage is not believed to have caused the same level of damage, it highlights the importance of reliable online services and the need for companies to have robust backup systems in place.
Update on the Situation
AWS confirmed significant error rates for requests to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region. The company stated that this issue also affected other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region, and that customers may not be able to create or update support cases during this time. Engineers were immediately engaged and were actively working to resolve the issue and fully understand the root cause. Users were advised to check for updates as more information became available.
