Cloud Computing Crisis Hits North America and Europe:
Hundreds Of Websites & Apps Reported Offline Following Outage At North Virginia Amazon Web Services Data Center
Hundreds of online services went temporarily offline across North America and Europe on Monday morning amid suggestions that the problem was linked to an outage at an Amazon Web Services data center in North Virginia.
Alongside Amazon services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Alexa a slew of other websites and apps also suffered problems, including Signal, Life360, Roblox, Zoom, Fortnight, IMDb, and Disney+ among many.
Cause:
The issue appeared to be linked to a severe outage at an AWS facility in North Virginia, but it has yet to be confirmed if this is the sole cause of wider issues, which were reported both in North America and Europe.
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AWS first reporting “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” just after midnight PT, with its latest message at 1.26am PT, saying the issue was ongoing.
“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” read the message.
“This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, was one of the first to point to the AWS outage at the cause of the problem, with a post on X saying: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it”.
The issue first started hitting the news as people woke up in Europe to discover a number of websites and apps were not working.
Monitoring sites such as Downdetector started to report a spike in issues for multiple sites and apps at around 8am UK time (midnight PT).
Impacted areas:
- Beyond entertainment and media sites
- a number of banking sites were also impacted including
- the UK’s Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and
- Halifax as well as cryptocurrency site Coinbase.
- The latter put out a statement saying all funds were safe.
The incident has echoes of an outage at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike in July 2024, which impacted 8.5 million Window devices worldwide, disrupting airlines, banks and government services at an estimated cost of $10b overall.
The exact cause of the outage has yet to be ascertained