AWS Outage Disrupts Global Digital Services, Affecting Major Apps and Banking
- tech360.tv
- 3 minutes ago
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A significant Amazon Web Services outage began shortly after midnight Pacific time on Monday, Oct. 20, leaving users unable to access numerous applications and online services. The widespread disruption impacted a diverse range of platforms globally.
Amazon identified the potential problem around 2 a.m. Pacific, locating its origin in the company’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia. The BBC reported this region, Amazon’s original and largest for web services, is considered a critical centre for the global internet but is prone to outages due to its age, size, and on-demand capacity.
Amazon admitted at 9:13 a.m. Pacific to experiencing further connectivity issues affecting AWS, despite ongoing repair efforts. Amazon stated, "We have taken additional mitigation steps."
Users in the U.S. reported fresh problems as recently as 7:29 a.m. Pacific, impacting services such as Venmo, Instacart, and the learning app Duolingo, which was on a “maintenance break.” Roblox and Fortnite were also offline, though both have since reported they are back online.
In the U.K., the outage significantly affected some NHS services and British banks. Lloyds, which reported issues, is now operating again. The British tax collection body, HMRC, also experienced problems.
National Rail reported its website and app were affected, directing passengers to the company’s account on X for real-time train information. At one point, Downdetector, an outage monitor, registered more than 6.5 million reports of issues, affecting over 1,000 companies.
Amazon itself was directly impacted, with smart speakers powered by Alexa going offline, and its security company Ring, along with Prime Video, experiencing access issues. Some users of Amazon Click and Collect and Drop Off services could not complete their tasks because the system was down.
AWS stated in a status update at 7:29 a.m. Pacific, "We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services. We are investigating." AWS also indicated it was throttling requests for new virtual servers to speed up the recovery process.
A major Amazon Web Services outage began shortly after midnight Pacific time on Monday, Oct. 20, originating in the US-EAST-1 region in Virginia.
The disruption affected popular U.S. services, including Venmo, Instacart, Duolingo, Roblox, and Fortnite.
U.K. services were also impacted, with issues reported for NHS services, British banks like Lloyds, HMRC, and National Rail.
Source: FORBES