Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS, which provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to numerous companies, governments and individuals, was hit by an outage on Monday, affecting several popular websites and apps.
The internet services monitoring platform Downdetector said Amazon’s own shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” AWS said.
Shortly afterward, it said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery.”
“We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” it added.
Disruption hits internet services
The AWS outage is the biggest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike failure, which crippled tech systems in hospitals, banks and airports worldwide.
Among the websites and apps facing problems are the AI startup Perplexity, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the trading app Robinhood.
Downdetector also reported outages affecting gaming platforms including Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans. Financial apps like PayPal’s Venmo and Chime also faced issues. Uber rival Lyft was down for thousands of US users.
Snapchat, Duolingo and several banks have also reported problems.
More to follow.
