Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.
On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app, and several other services.
Both Coinbase and Signal said on X that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.
The first signs of the issue appeared around 3:11 a.m. ET, when Amazon Web Services reported on its health dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 region.”
Later, the company stated that there were “high error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.
About two hours later, AWS said in an update that it had implemented “initial mitigations,” and quickly followed up to say: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be successful. We continue to work through the backlog of requests in the queue.”
AWS customers include some of the world’s largest companies and organizations.
“Much of the world now relies on these three or four big cloud computing companies that provide the underlying infrastructure that when there is a problem like this, it can have a real impact across a wide range, a wide range” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, a UK-based Chartered IT institute.