An AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage knocked a massive portion of online services out of service, which has had rippling effects on internet connectivity for users. The failure highlights a frightening reliance on the cloud service.
At around 12:00 a.m. ET, a number of websites and apps across platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows went down. We first noticed it with Apple TV going right after midnight, and reports began flooding in that services like Snapchat, Ally, Venmo, Delta Airlines, and more suddenly came to a halt shortly after.
Amazon took responsibility for this partial internet outage in a report from the company’s status checker. At 12:11 a.m. PT, the company noted that sudden increased error rates and latencies began occuring throughout the night. Every single Amazon service was then affected, including the online shopping platform itself.
Amazon Web Services is responsible for hosting hundred of popular website and services. Those range from game services to banking apps, which is a scary thought considering how widespread the outage is. AT&T and Verizon were also reportedly affected by the downage, leaving users without access to parts of the network. It’s unclear if anyone experienced cell network failure, though it seems that would be unaffected.
Some reports on DownDetector note that Google and YouTube were affected, though neither relies on Amazon Web Services. During widespread outages like this, a slower internet connection is prevelant and foundational sites like Google are often mistaken for the issue. At the time of writing, it appears that Google’s services like YouTube and Google TV are unnafected. Apps within those platforms, however, may not fare so well.
The latest update from Amazon notes that the company is still investigating the root cause for the connection issues imnpacting AWS. Status is still set to “degraded” at the time of writing, indicating that services are still being affected. This comes after Amazon said it mitigated the issue, though it’s since resurfaced. It’s unlcear how many websites and services are being disrupted at this time, though DownDetector’s homepage looks like the new theme color is red.
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