Featured Image Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty
Perish the thought, we might have to actually put down our phones and talk to each other. You know what it's like when Instagram or Twitter goes down, with people flooding the internet in a panic like it's the end of days.
While it tends to be a case of just one app going down in an isolated incident, a major global outage has taken out some of the biggest platforms around. If you're looking for someone to blame, angry users are putting Jeff Bezos in the firing line because it looks like it's all to do with Amazon.
Apparently, an issue with the Amazon Web Services cloud system had led to a massive outage for everything from Reddit to Roblox, Strava to Snapchat. Starting in the early hours of October 20, Downdetector reported a spike in issues, with a growing list encompassing a whole host of apps we use every day.
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Although AWS reported there was some restoration, it shows how just one damaged cog can bring the whole machine down. Making $108 billion in 2024 and accounting for the majority of Amazon's profits, AWS is the most popular provider of such cloud services in the world.
AWS maintains that the problem is fixed, posting the following message on its site: "We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.
“We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Still, there are multiple reports that this isn't the case, with apps like Slack and Reddit failing to load properly.
• Amazon
• Amazon Alexa
• Amazon Music
• Amazon Prime Video
• Amazon Web Services
• Ancestry
• Asana
• Atlassian
• Bank Of Scotland
• Blink Security
• BT
• Canva
• Clash Of Clans
• Clash Royale
• Coinbase
• Dead By Daylight
• Duolingo
• EE
• Epic Games Store
• Eventbrite
• Flickr
• Fortnite
• Government Gateway services (including HMRC)
• Halifax
• Hay Day
• Hinge
• HMRC
• IMDB
• Jira Software
• Just Eat
• Life360
• Lloyds Bank
• Microsoft 365
• My Fitness Pal
• Peloton
• Perplexity AI
• PlayStation Network
• Pokemon Go
• Ring
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• Signal
• Sky Mobile
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Snapchat
• Strava
• Square
• Tidal
• Wordle
• Xero
• Zoom
We're no closer to figuring out what caused the outage, although the immediate fear was hackers. Given that key financial services are among the many affected apps, there are obvious cybersecurity concerns.
Speaking to The Independent, Alan Woodward, visiting professor of computing at the University of Surrey, claimed it could be something relatively minor that's knocked AWS from its pedestal. Woodward downplayed previous theories about it being a hack, explaining: "Although we don’t yet know the exact cause of the outage at AWS history suggests it will be something relatively simple like a misconfiguration in DNS or BGP.
"Once these errors propagate across the Internet it takes a while for the update to reach the far corners of the Internet so the outage can appear longer than you might expect for such minor errors.”
Still, Woodward reiterated how fragile things can be when we put all our eggs in one virtual basket: "What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is.
“So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers. Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”
Amazon confirmed that engineers were 'immediately engaged' with the issue, so it hopefully won't be too long until everything is up and running again. If not hackers, this embarrassing AWS outage could be down to anything from a misapplied update to someone accidentally flicking off an important setting.
