Early Thursday morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a widespread outage. This disruption affected a wide range of online services, notably affecting high-traffic platforms like Snapchat and Fortnite. The issue first emerged at approximately 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, as reported by the company on its Health Dashboard.
The fallout from the outage largely affected services that depended on the US-EAST-1 region, which is often considered the backbone of AWS’s massive cloud infrastructure. AWS first started to report signs of recovery on all but the hardest-hit services around 6 a.m. Eastern Time. The company further stated that the global services and functions dependent on US-EAST-1 have all regained function. Yet they are all still short of determining a full solution to the problem.
According to cyber experts, the real fear of such an outage is its massive ripple effect across all services that would be impacted. Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, explained that many of the world’s online platforms rely heavily on just a few major cloud computing providers.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum,” – Patrick Burgess.
Burgess reiterated that the quality of these outages can obscure the real cause from users, leaving them unaware. He stated,
“It’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox.”
However alarming the disruption, Burgess was somewhat comforted to hear that these technical hitches usually get resolved within a few hours. He remarked,
“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve). This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue; something’s gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon.”
As of now, AWS has confirmed that there is no evidence that the outage was due to a cyber event or attack. The fix is currently in place for a number of affected services, and the company is working diligently to service all impacted services to full functionality.
