A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide, including Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo, and Amazon's own retail site and Ring doorbell service. The incident has reignited concerns about the internet's over-reliance on a handful of cloud providers.
According to Downdetector, over 2,000 companies were affected, with 8.1 million user reports globally, including 1.9 million in the US, 1 million in the UK, and 418,000 in Australia. In the UK, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and HM Revenue and Customs experienced issues, while Ring users reported doorbell malfunctions.
The outage began around 8am BST in AWS's US-East-1 region on the east coast of the US. Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” and later implemented request limits to aid recovery. By Monday evening, AWS said all services had “returned to normal operations,” though some problems persisted throughout the day.
Experts argue the incident underscores the need for diversification in cloud computing. Dr Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 stated: “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.” Cori Crider of the Future of Technology Institute added: “The UK can’t keep leaving its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants.”
Professor Madeline Carr of University College London noted the counter-argument that large hyperscalers have the resources to provide resilient services, but acknowledged that “most people outside those companies would argue that is a risky position for the world to be in.” The outage follows last year's CrowdStrike incident, which caused widespread disruption after a faulty software update affected Microsoft Windows.
