Mondays, am I right? The work week started off in a chaotic way with hundreds of apps going down for several hours in the a.m. The apps were all linked to Amazon’s cloud network.
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Apps included mobile social media platforms like Snapchat as well as the security and doorbell app Ring. Additionally, people had struggles accessing Amazon itself. Thousands of reports flooded in on the Downdetector, a website that tracks online disruptions.
Even people’s entertainment was affected. The mega popular video games Roblox and Fortnite suffered issues related to the outtage. Other platforms included Zoom, Slack, Venmo, Coinbase, Hulu, WhatsApp, and Microsoft 365.
Amazon Outages
All those affected shared one thing in common. They used Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) vast cloud network. The service is widespread across the internet. According to the Amazon service status page, it experieced “multiple AWS services” with error rates.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon wrote.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”
The exact cause of the outage remains undetermined. However, the company identified the cause to a data center in Virginia.
Even travel was affected, alarmingly. United Airlines revealed that some internal systems were temporarily affected.
“United implemented back-up systems to end the technology disruption and our teams are working to get our customers on their way,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, experts weighed in on the Amazon outtage.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” said Mike Chapple at University of Notre Dame. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”