A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide, including Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo, as well as Amazon-owned services like its retail site and Ring. The incident has reignited concerns about the fragility of the global internet, which experts say is overly dependent on a small number of cloud computing providers.
According to Downdetector, over 2,000 companies were affected, with 8.1 million user reports of problems, including 1.9 million in the US, 1 million in the UK, and 418,000 in Australia. In the UK, Lloyds Bank and its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland experienced issues, alongside HM Revenue and Customs. Ring users reported doorbell failures, and platforms such as Wordle, Coinbase, and Slack were also impacted.
Amazon confirmed that the issue originated in its US-East-1 region on the east coast of the US, causing increased error rates and latencies. By Monday evening, AWS stated that all services had returned to normal operations. However, the outage lasted several hours, with some services experiencing persistent problems throughout the day.
Experts warned that the incident underscores the dangers of relying on a few tech giants for critical internet infrastructure. Dr Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 called for urgent diversification in cloud computing, stating that democratic discourse and secure communications cannot depend on a handful of companies. Cori Crider of the Future of Technology Institute added that the UK must not leave its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants.
Professor Madeline Carr of University College London noted that while large hyperscalers have resources to provide secure services, most experts view the current concentration as risky. The outage follows last year's CrowdStrike incident, which caused the largest outage in history, affecting airports and healthcare globally.
