Oct. 20 (UPI) — Amazon Web Services’ cloud services global outage disrupted Internet service for companies, governments, universities and individual users on Monday. It wasn’t until a half day later, the coverage was heavily restored.
By Monday afternoon on the U.S. East Coast, Amazon said the connectivity issues had been “fully mitigated,” though there were still reports of problems.
More than 1,000 companies were affected, including large tech companies, CNET reported, but there is no evidence it was caused by a cyber attack. Instead, “the root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”
AWS accounted for 37% of the global cloud market in 2024, according to market research firm. That represents revenue more than $107 billion for the tech company. Amazon’s total revenue was $639 revenue that year.
The services run on 3.7 million plus miles of fiber optic cables.
Downdetector, a website that aggregates user-submitted reports of disruptions, logged 6.5 million global reports related to the outage, a spokesperson for the site’s parent company Ookla told CNN.
Toms Guide showed how traffic was affected at major companies, including Verizon, Lyft, McDonald’s, Snapchat, and airl as Delta, Southwest and United airlines.
Also were the New York Times’ website, T-Mobile and AT&T were affected. Even massive tech companies, Google and Apple, were impacted. And Zoom, which gained prominance during the pandemic for people to communite, had outage issues.
Disrupted, too, were banks and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbbase and Venmo.
Amazon’s own services were disrupted. Alexa-enabled smart plugs, which allow people to control appliances and other devices remotely, didn’t have service. Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras weren’t working. Some reported they were unable to access the company’s website or download books to their Kindles. And Netflix wasn’t available.
“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint said in a statement to CNN. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”
Tenscope showed that Amazon alone was losing $72.3 milion per hour, and customers lost several hundred thousand dollars each 60 minutes.
In cloud services, AW provides a space where businesses can rent the services instead of building their own servers.
“It’s like: ‘Why build the house if you’re just going to live in it?'” Lance Ulanoff, editor at the technology publication TechRadar, told CNN.
And there are problems with devices when service is disrupted.
“They just don’t work without the Internet,” Ulanoff said. ” They’re not designed that way,. We’ve designed everything to work with that constant connectivity and when you pull that big plug, everything, basically becomes dumb.”
Apparently, the problem originated from a system designed to monitor how much load is on the network. As a workaround, Amazon said it was allowing companies to create new instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud, a virtual machine that allows customers to build cloud-based applications.
At the peak of the incident, early Monday, AWS reported more than 70 of its own services were impacted.
“Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” it said, urging customers to utilize the “clear cacheclear cache” option in the settings of their browser if problems with errors persisted.
Amazon reported at 1:26 a.m. EDT that there was a “significant error rates for requests.”
“Error 404” messaged popped up on computers.
At 3:11 a.m. EDT, Amazon “reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined that the issue was related” to the Northern Virginia region, according to a news release.
Amazon reported at 5:24 a.m. EDT, service was “fully mitigated.”
Then at 10:29 a.m., Amazon said there were application programming interface errors and connectivity issues “across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
Around 3:30 p.m., AWS said its systems mostly were back online. “We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services,” the company said.
In Britain, Gov.uk and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the two main portals of the British government, said they had been affected.
“We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible,” said a government spokesman.
Lloyds Bank and subsidiary, Halifax, two of the country’s largest banks, and National Rail also experienced problems.
The outage comes 15 months after a global IT outage in July 2024 that crashed millions of computers used by 911 centers, airlines, financial institutions, airlines and media around the world, due to an issue with a third-party security update for Microsoft Windows systems.
The auto download from Texas-based CrowdStrike cybersecurity for its Falcon software caused computers to hang after they were able to fully restart after the update.