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Amazon’s cloud business was hit by an outage on Monday, causing disruption to several global web services and apps.
Amazon Web Services reported an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” in Northern Virginia, a hub for its global data centres.
US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity and London Stock Exchange Group data services all reported problems linked to AWS.
Websites including Snapchat, Lloyds Bank and BT were all suffering from disruption on Monday, according to the Downdetector.com website. Users were also unable to log into the UK’s tax authority, with the HM Revenue & Customs website displaying a message that it was “temporarily unavailable”.
AWS is the global leader in cloud computing services, ahead of Microsoft and Google. Its data centres and applications underpin mobile apps and websites from big companies and digital services for various governments.
In an update later on Monday, AWS said that it was “seeing significant signs of recovery” after it “applied initial mitigations”. It added that “most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests”.
AWS is a significant profit driver for the ecommerce giant, which is investing tens of billions of dollars in expanding data centres to train and deploy AI-enabled applications.
It was not immediately clear whether the widespread problems reported by websites worldwide were all linked to the AWS problems.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” said Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive, in a message on social media site X.