A widespread disruption on Monday affecting many major websites and services was caused by an Amazon Web Services outage that began early in the morning and gradually improved as engineers worked on fixes. Amazon Web Services cited an “operational issue” and later reported “significant signs of recovery” in restoring its cloud services used by companies and universities across the country, according to Click2Houston.
Amazon Web Services experienced DNS issues within its DynamoDB service, causing outages across multiple platforms including Venmo, Hulu, McDonald’s, Disney+, Lyft, Coinbase, The New York Times, Snapchat, and U.K. government sites such as Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs. Downdetector showed increased reports of problems during the event. Amazon Web Services said by 6:35 a.m. PDT that most operations were successful and the majority of issues had been “fully mitigated.” A U.K. government spokesperson said, “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure,” and confirmed that the situation was being monitored, as reported by CNBC.
A large tech outage affected several major services, including Lloyds Banking Group, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, and Perplexity. Perplexity’s CEO said on X that Amazon Web Services caused their service issue. Experts said the event showed how many companies depend on a small number of cloud providers. Notre Dame IT professor Mike Chapple told CNBC that "DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know," but it is widely used in online systems, and the interruption was in another part of the system, not in the data itself.
