The problem affected hundreds of sites, including some of the largest in the world.
WASHINGTON โ Amazon Web Services appear to be at least partially online again after suffering a second outage outage, hours after the company said it had mitigated an issue that caused major disruptions to popular sites around the world overnight.ย
The new disruption began around 10:30 a.m. Eastern, and appeared to be widespread. Web services for Adobe and Amazon itself appeared to be completely unreachable Monday morning. By noon, however, at least some of the affected sites were back online, with Amazon.com back up.
But other sites using the AWS systems appeared to remain broken,ย including Amazon’s music streaming platform.
“We have confirmed multiple AWS services experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said in a statement shortly after the new issues began. “We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and are continuing to investigate the root cause.”
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a major cloud hosting site that underpins much of the internet. AWS customers include some of the worldโs biggest businesses and organizations.
The problem affected hundreds of sites, including some of the largest in the world.ย
Amazon, Venmo, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Slack, Fortnite and Microsoft365 were some of the major websites and web services affected in the morning outage, which appears to be ongoing despite several hours of stability.ย
The outage appears to have begun around 3 a.m. Eastern Monday morning, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks online outages. On its website, Downdetector acknowledged the widespread problem with a banner on top of the site.ย
“User reports indicate issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US-East-1 region,” the site said. “These problems are impacting multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure. Weโre monitoring the situation: check your local Downdetector site for the latest updates.”ย
But by 6 a.m., some of the issues appeared to be resolving. Amazon said in a statement that sometime after 5 a.m., it had applied “initial mitigation” and confirmed that some websites were beginning to come back online.,ย
โWe are seeing significant signs of recovery,” the company said in a statement. “Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.โ
Although the outage happened overnight in the U.S. and therefore affected fewer American internet users, it underscores the importance of Amazon’s cloud-based services to the internet as a whole.ย
โSo much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when thereโs an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrumโ of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.ย
