A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has disrupted numerous websites and apps worldwide, including in the UK. The National Rail website and app experienced performance issues, with some users reporting slow response times. Amazon's own retail site and Ring doorbell service were also affected, alongside platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo.
The outage, which began in the US-EAST-1 region, stemmed from problems with AWS's DynamoDB database service. AWS has reported gradual recovery across its services, with Lambda invocation errors fully resolved as of 1:03pm PT. However, residual network connectivity issues may cause intermittent errors for some functions.
UK politicians have demanded answers regarding the disruption. The House of Commons Treasury Committee wrote to Economic Secretary Lucy Rigby, questioning why AWS has not been designated a 'critical third party' to the UK's financial services sector. Cori Crider of the Future of Technology Institute warned that the UK is 'dangerously overexposed to foreign Big Tech monopolies.'
In London, at least one Post Office branch refused to process Amazon returns due to the outage, as barcodes could not be logged. AWS continued to promote its upcoming 23 October event during the disruption, sending an email to customers encouraging them to register.
