AWS Crashes Overnight, Causes Multiple Company Outages – KXL

WASHINGTON (AP) — The internet appears to be recovering after an overnight outage at Amazon Web Services caused major disruptions to popular websites around the world.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a major cloud hosting site that underpins much of the internet. AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

The problem affected hundreds of sites, including some of the largest in the world.

Amazon, Venmo, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Slack, Fortnite and Microsoft365 were some of the major websites and web services affected.

The outage appears to have begun around 3 a.m. Eastern Monday morning, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks online outages. On its website, Downdetector acknowledged the widespread problem with a banner on top of the site.

“User reports indicate issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US-East-1 region,” the site said. “These problems are impacting multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure. We’re monitoring the situation: check your local Downdetector site for the latest updates.”

But by 6 a.m., some of the issues appeared to be resolving. Amazon said in a statement that sometime after 5 a.m., it had applied “initial mitigation” and confirmed that some websites were beginning to come back online.,

“We are seeing significant signs of recovery,” the company said in a statement. “Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.”

Although the outage happened overnight in the U.S. and therefore affected fewer American internet users, it underscores the importance of Amazon’s cloud-based services to the internet as a whole.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.