On Friday, a huge outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) created quite a stir online, knocking out some of the biggest platforms and banking services around the globe. So, it turns out that Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Duolingo, and Reddit were just a few of the many websites that got hit.
On top of that, customers from Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland experienced some pretty significant disruptions. It turns out that even the UK’s National Rail website and app were hit, which meant passengers couldn’t get any travel info. Downdetector noted over four million user complaints from around the globe as issues popped up in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, which supports millions of websites and digital systems.
Amazon later mentioned that it was “seeing significant signs of recovery” and had fixed the main issue, although some features were still in the process of being restored. Amazon pointed to “DNS resolution” issues as the cause of the outage, which is an essential process that helps websites and apps link up with their servers.
So, it looks like most systems are starting to stabilise, but we might still see some delays since there are millions of requests being processed all at once. So, on Friday, Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, ran into a big technical issue that caused some parts of the internet to go down for a bit.
There was an outage that affected a bunch of global apps and services, from banks to gaming platforms. Users were reporting issues accessing Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, and even their online banking apps. Amazon mentioned that the problem was due to DNS resolution errors, which ended up disrupting the system that manages the traffic flow between users and servers.
AWS mentioned that they were noticing some good signs of recovery by mid-morning, but experts cautioned that it would take a while to get everything back to normal. Some requests that came in while things were down are still being worked on, leading to digital backlogs that feel like “millions of messages being sent at once.”
Even though a lot of services are coming back online, Reddit is still lagging behind, mentioning issues like “degraded performance” and “too many requests” errors. AWS has also recognised that there are still issues with launching new EC2 instances, which are the virtual computers that drive a lot of the internet.
The incident really shows how much the world relies on Amazon’s cloud. Just a short outage caused waves across global commerce, entertainment, and infrastructure.