Huge Amazon internet outage leaves Snapchat, Reddit, banks and more not working: Latest updates
Down Detector was flooded with huge spikes just after 8am UK time - with some issues coming back this afternoon
Many of the world’s biggest apps and websites have been broken for hours in a worldwide outage.
Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva were all suffering problems, according to tracking website Down Detector.
The issues began around 8am in the UK, or midnight pacific time, and have been continuing through the day.
The problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers infrastructure that underpins much of the modern internet.
Amazon Web Services provides a host of internet infrastructure services that allow companies to hire computers and servers to run their apps and websites. As such, any problems at AWS can quickly affect much of the rest of the internet, bringing down websites that might have no apparent connection to Amazon itself.
It is now the most popular provider of such cloud services in the world. It made $108 billion last year, and it now accounts for the majority of Amazon’s profits.
People's beds get warm in outage
The outage had some unusual and unexpected effects: it kept some people up. The CEO of Eight Sleep, the internet-connected mattress company, said that some people’s beds got unexpectedly warm because of the problems.
In a reply, Franceschetti says that the company is working to build an “outage mode” to fix the fact that it can’t work when the internet isn’t working properly.
Things should have returned to normal now
The great Amazon outage appears to be over, and the world has largely recovered. The company has said that it will offer a full explanation of what went wrong later, but this (slightly technical explanation) is what it says for now.
Why is the internet broken? How one small problem can take down the whole web
The scale of today’s outage has prompted a somewhat familiar question: do we rely on a few small companies too much? (But it’s not so familiar, which might also be an indication of why we do rely on them.)
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Why the internet just broke
Outage might not be over
Amazon’s service status page has just been updated again. The problem might not be entirely fixed.
“We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” it reads. “We are investigating and will provide further update in 30 minutes or soon if we have additional information.”
In simpler terms: things seem to be breaking again.
Is the internet too centralised?
That’s the question asked in a new piece from our colleagues on the Voices team. The internet was originally intended as a self-sustaining network, kept alive by all of its users, notes Chris Stokel-Walker. But these days it relies on a very very small number of companies to keep much of the web running.
Read the full piece here.
The AWS outage is proof someone is breaking the internet
EA App stops working, users complain
Some players are saying that their EA app is offline, and they are unable to play games (such as has the newly released Battlefield 6) as a result.
“The app couldn’t connect to EA’s servers,” an error message reads. “Check your internet connection, and try again.”
EA’s status website doesn’t yet show any problem with any of its platforms.
It’s not clear whether it’s related to the AWS outage. (If it is, then it would be strange if it began now, given that everything else is coming back to normal.) But either way it’s been a big day of things not working.
Problems could continue for the 'rest of the day'
The underlying issue might be fixed. But it could take some time before everything is working as expected, says one expert.
“This morning an issue affecting Amazon’s US East caused significant disruption, with the underlying cause attributed to a problem with DNS - the ‘phone book’ of the internet that helps computers find each other,” Graeme Bragg, a computer networking expert at the University of Southampton.
“This has affected lots of services hosted in different regions because Amazon host a lot of their management infrastructure that other services depend on in that region. This is a significant outage because of how many companies rely on Amazon and the global scale of the impact.
“The underlying issue has now been resolved but it will take some time to propagate across the internet. Amazon’s servers also have a backlog of requests to work through, so it’s likely that we will see some disruption for the rest of the day.”
Reddit says it has fixed its issues
A post on Reddit’s status page says that it is aware of an earlier issue but that it has since been fixed. It doesn’t say whether it was actually related to the broader AWS outage. (It certainly seemed to begin later than that.)
Outage might be making it harder to respond to the outage
The nature of the outage might actually make it difficult to respond to the outage, points out Jon Crowcroft FRS FREng, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at the University of Cambridge.
“One interesting challenge is that the back channels a lot of tech people use to communicate information/tech details about ongoing outages are also taken down by this outage - hence our usual ways of learning (e.g. via signal or slack) are both currently stymied by the AWS outage,” he said.
Complaints seem to be falling – but problems persist
Down Detector, the tracking website for outages, has been an alarming red all day. And it’s still that colour, but it does seem to be calming down a little.
Amazon has said that it is still working towards full recovery, so it makes sense that some people will continue to run into problems with some apps.
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