Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage on Tuesday, affecting thousands of websites and applications globally. The disruption, which began in the US-EAST-1 region, impacted popular platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo, and Amazon's own retail site and Ring doorbell service. The UK's National Rail website also reported slow performance.
AWS confirmed that the issue stemmed from its DynamoDB database service and affected multiple Availability Zones. The company issued updates throughout the day, noting gradual recovery. By late afternoon, AWS reported that Lambda invocation errors had fully recovered and that service restoration was ongoing across all services.
The outage sparked concerns about over-reliance on a small number of cloud providers. Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, warned that the UK is "dangerously overexposed to foreign Big Tech monopolies." UK politicians also demanded answers, with the Treasury Committee writing to Economic Secretary Lucy Rigby to question why Amazon has not been designated a "critical third party" to the financial sector.
Practical disruptions included Amazon's inability to process parcel returns at some Post Office branches, as barcodes could not be logged. Despite the outage, Amazon continued to promote its upcoming AWS event on 23 October, sending promotional emails to customers during the crisis.
