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Amazon’s cloud business suffered significant “errors and connectivity issues” on Monday as it tried to recover from a widespread outage that forced customers’ apps and websites offline.
The Seattle-based group said it had “fully mitigated” the underlying issue with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services early on Monday morning, but was still working to get all its clients back online.
“Some customers still continue to experience increased error rates with AWS services,” the company said. “We are working to fully restore service as quickly as possible.”
The outage disrupted a range of companies from ride-hailing app Lyft and coffee chain Starbucks to Lloyds Bank and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
AWS — the world’s largest cloud provider, which rents server space to businesses to run their online services — blamed the issues on faults at its data centre hub in northern Virginia.
Problems with an Amazon database service known as DynamoDB left systems unable to match website names with the numerical IP addresses required to load apps and web pages.
The outage highlighted how dependent the internet has become on a handful of Big Tech companies.
Other groups hit by Monday’s outage included Snapchat, the crypto exchange Coinbase and BT, according to Downdetector.com.
The London Stock Exchange Group’s data services also reported problems linked to the AWS fault, along with the website of HM Revenue & Customs, the British tax authority.
Some of Amazon’s own business, such as its Ring video-doorbell service, and Alexa, its digital voice assistant, were also affected.
Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos, said the disruption caused by the outage “does show us how pervasive services like AWS are in supporting the apps and services that we use every day”.
Hours after reporting an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” early on Monday, AWS said the problem had been “fully mitigated”.
But users continued to experience errors accessing numerous websites as the cloud giant brought services back online.
Coinbase said it had seen “early signs of recovery”. The Lloyds banking app was also accessible after earlier problems.
AWS later said that it was still experiencing connectivity issues and was taking additional steps to aid the recovery of a “internal subsystem” that had failed.
Cyber security group Cloudflare said that online traffic from AWS was “closer to normal levels” but it was still showing “signs of degraded performance” and more failures than usual.
AWS, which leads Microsoft and Google in cloud computing services, is a big profit driver for Amazon, with analysts forecasting the division will generate more than $126bn in revenue this fiscal year.
The parent group has pledged to invest at least $100bn in the business this year, the bulk of which will be spent on building data centres to train and deploy AI-enabled applications.
Pilling added that there was no indication of a malicious attack, but advised users to be cautious when opening any links purporting to be from AWS as cyber criminals might seek to take advantage of the situation.
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