Amazon’s AWS struggles to recover after major outage disrupts apps, services worldwide

NEW YORK: Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.

The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.

After more than six hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 10:00 a.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged it was still experiencing elevated errors.

“We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services ... We are investigating,” AWS said in the latest update on its status page.

To aid the recovery, AWS said it was putting in place limits on the number of requests that can be made on its platform.

While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo , were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.

ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud. AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered previous outages in 2021 and 2020.

Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and Fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the issue appeared to be with one of the networking systems AWS uses to control a database product.

“As this issue can usually be resolved centrally ... unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours,” he said.