As a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a major incident on Monday, causing many well-known websites to be paralyzed. At 2:01 a.m. Pacific time, AWS pointed out in an update announcement that this "operational issue" affected "multiple services" and said it was "expediting the recovery process through multiple parallel paths." Nearly 70 of its own services have now been affected.
Shortly after, AWS said it had observed "significant signs of recovery."
"Most requests should be processed normally at this time. We are still working through the backlog of queued requests and will continue to provide more updates," the announcement added.
Some service was restored at 3:03 a.m. PT. AWS said: "We can confirm that global services and functionality that rely on the US-EAST-1 region have also been restored. We will continue to work on a comprehensive recovery and will update as more information becomes available."
Fault monitoring platform Downdetector shows that affected platforms reported by users include Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, McDonald's app, New York Times official website, Reddit, Ring (smart security brand), Robinhood (stock trading platform), Sarab, T-Mobile (telecommunications operator), United Airlines (United Airlines), Venmo (payment application) and Verizon (Telecommunications operator).
Some United Airlines and Delta Air Lines passengers said on social media that they were unable to check reservation information, check in or check in luggage online.
Other social media users said that cloud games such as "Robulus" and "Fortnite" experienced service interruptions; the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase stated that many users were unable to access its platform due to this outage.
Graphic design tool Canva said: "The current platform error rate has increased significantly, which has affected the normal use of Canva's functions. This problem stems from a major failure of our underlying cloud service provider (i.e. AWS)."
Artificial intelligence search tool Perplexity was also affected. Its CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on the X platform (formerly Twitter): "The root cause of the problem is an AWS failure, and we are working hard to solve it."
This is not the first time that large companies have been affected by technical glitches. In July 2024, a software upgrade error by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike exposed the fragility of the world's technology infrastructure - the error paralyzed Microsoft Windows systems, causing chaos worth millions of dollars, grounding thousands of flights, and affecting the normal operations of hospitals and banks.