‘Significant Signs of Recovery’ After Snapchat, Roblox and Other Major Websites Go Down
Amazon Web Services experienced a significant outage on Monday morning, taking Snapchat, Roblox, Reddit and several major banks offline for users in North America and Europe.
As of 11:35 a.m. U.K. time, “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” according to the cloud computing division’s status page.
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Websites and apps affected by the outage included Amazon services like Amazon Music, Prime Video, Ring and Alexa, as well as other platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Reddit, Signal, Duolingo, U.K. bank Lloyds and HM Revenue and Customs. According to BBC News, Downdetector received more than 4 million reports from users around the world for over 500 companies.
The outage began around 8 a.m. BST and stemmed from Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia, the tech giant’s largest hub for web services. By 10:30 a.m., Amazon Web Services reported “significant signs of recovery.” Though the reason for the outage is unclear, in its 11:35 a.m. update Amazon Web Services said “the underlying DNS issue” had been “fully mitigated.” DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, translates website names into IP addresses that are then read by computers and direct users to where they need to go.
“Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” the statement continued. “Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda. While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates. We continue to work toward full resolution.”
Despite much of the internet being affected, not all websites and apps use Amazon Web Services. Google, Meta and X continued to run as normal, with Elon Musk posting on his platform: “X still works.”
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