Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading cloud computing platform, experienced a major outage on Monday, causing widespread disruption to websites, online services, and banking systems globally. The outage affected numerous services, including those of UK banks such as Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, with Downdetector reporting 6,925 complaints for Lloyds at 9.31am.
AWS provides cloud computing resources to companies, enabling them to rent computing power and storage rather than maintaining their own servers. The platform underpins many digital services, making the outage significant. Users reported issues with Ring doorbells and other connected devices.
AWS stated that it had identified a potential root cause, linking the problem to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region. DNS resolution is the process that allows companies to connect to AWS servers. The company said it was working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.
Services affected include EC2, CloudWatch, CloudFront, and VPC Lattice. AWS continues to investigate and restore services.
