A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted numerous apps and websites globally, including Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo, and Amazon's own retail site and Ring doorbell service. The incident has reignited concerns about the internet's over-reliance on a small number of cloud providers.
According to Downdetector, over 2,000 companies were affected, with 8.1 million problem reports worldwide, including 1.9 million in the US, 1 million in the UK, and 418,000 in Australia. In the UK, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and the HMRC website experienced issues, while Ring users reported doorbell failures.
Amazon confirmed the problem originated in its US-East-1 region on the east coast, causing increased error rates and latencies from around 8am BST. By Monday evening, AWS stated all services had returned to normal operations, though some platforms faced persistent issues throughout the day.
Experts have called for greater diversification in cloud computing. Dr Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 warned that democratic discourse and secure communications cannot depend on a handful of companies. Cori Crider of the Future of Technology Institute said the UK must not leave its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants. Professor Madeline Carr of University College London noted the counter-argument that large hyperscalers have the resources to provide resilient services, but acknowledged the risks.
The outage follows last year's CrowdStrike incident, which caused widespread disruptions. AWS, the world's largest cloud platform, rents server space to numerous businesses, making such failures far-reaching.
