A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing giant that powers a significant portion of the internet, is now reported to be “fully mitigated,” according to the company’s latest status update. The early Monday disruption had caused widespread chaos, crippling numerous popular apps, games, financial platforms, and key business systems across the globe.
The problem, which originated in AWS’s critical US-EAST-1 region, was initially attributed to a DNS resolution issue (a problem with the internet’s “phone book” finding the correct address) related to its DynamoDB database service, leading to cascading failures.
Amazon Web Services confirmed on its status page that services in its eastern U.S. region were experiencing “increased error rates and latencies.” Engineers are reportedly “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause.”
Early indications from AWS pointed to issues with its DynamoDB database service and the cascading effect it was having on other services.
Recovery Underway, But Lingering Issues Remain
Amazon Web Services announced on its service status page that the underlying issue has been “fully mitigated” and “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.” The company had earlier confirmed it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” around 5:30 a.m. EDT.
However, while the crisis moment appears to be over, the return to stability is not yet complete. The company noted that some requests may be “throttled” and that several dependent services are still working through a large backlog of queued requests that accumulated during the hours-long downtime. Users are advised to expect variations in service levels until full resolution is achieved across the entire network.
Widespread Impact on Popular Services
The incident was a demonstration of the world’s reliance on a few cloud providers, affecting a diverse array of organizations, including governments, universities, and large companies, such as The Associated Press.
User reports on the outage-tracking website DownDetector showed massive spikes for services including:
- Social Media & Communication: Snapchat, Signal, Reddit.
- Gaming: Roblox and Fortnite.
- Finance: Online broker Robinhood, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and payment service Venmo.
- Amazon’s Own Ecosystem: Amazon.com, Prime Video, and the Alexa personal assistant.
- Other Apps: The McDonald’s app, educational platform Duolingo, and design tool Canva.
The incident is expected to renew discussions among businesses about the need for greater redundancy and multi-region deployment strategies to safeguard against centralized infrastructure failures.
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