By Deborah Mary Sophia and Shubham Kalia, Reuters
(File photo) Photo: 123RF
- An Amazon AWS outage has affected major websites and apps in New Zealand and globally
- Downdetector has reported widespread issues and a number of organisations have cited the AWS outage as the cause
- Communications, financial, news and gaming platforms are among those impacted
- The issue originated at a US site known for previous outages
- Recovery has been rocky after earlier improvement
Amazon's cloud services unit AWS is struggling to recover from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.
The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.
After about eight hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 12:00 ET (5am Tuesday NZT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services.
AWS was down for more than 7800 users as of 11.46am ET (4.46am NZT), according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5800 reports at 3.48am (8.38pm Monday NZT).
"We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said in the latest update on its status page.
The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network."
EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal's Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.
Issue originated from AWS site known for previous outages
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud.
AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered previous outages in 2021 and 2020.
Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and Fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the issue appeared to be with one of the networking systems AWS uses to control a database product.
"As this issue can usually be resolved centrally ... unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours," he said.
New Zealand sites affected
On Monday night, Downdetector.co.nz reported issues with AWS, Alexa, TVNZ, Spark, One, Facebook, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Ring, Epic Games, Playstation Network, Steam, MyFitnessPal, Duolingo and Wordle among others.
Sky New Zealand said issues with its On Demand services on Monday night were also connected to the AWS outage: "... thanks for bearing with us. There is currently an Amazon Web Services global issue that's affecting On Demand viewing for New Sky Box, Sky Pod, Sky Go, and Neon customers."
Hours later, a rocky recovery
Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.
Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7700 reports on Downdetector, up from about 4000 reports earlier, but still lower than the peak of more than 22,000.
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.
Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States.
In a post on X, Signal's President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.
Outage exposes risk of dependence on handful of providers
In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website.
The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.
"The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science.
While there has been no indication yet of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation.
"When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos.
"AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset."
- Reuters / Additional reporting by RNZ
