AWS Restored after Global Outage

Amazon announced that its cloud services, AWS, have returned to operation following an internet outage that disrupted thousands of websites worldwide, including popular applications such as Snapchat and Reddit.

However, Amazon warned that some of its services, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), have message backlogs that could take a few hours to process.

The sudden AWS outage on Monday caused disruptions for thousands of websites worldwide, affecting applications like Snapchat and Reddit.

AWS provides applications and computing operations for companies globally. 

This outage disrupted employees from London to Tokyo and prevented others from performing routine tasks, such as paying hairdressers or changing flight tickets. 

Users also reported difficulties with services like the Venmo digital wallet and Zoom video calls.

This is the largest internet outage since last year’s CrowdStrike disruption, which affected hospital, bank, and airport systems, highlighting the fragility of globally interconnected technologies.

This was at least the third major internet outage caused by the AWS data center in Northern Virginia in the past five years. 

Amazon has not clarified why this particular data center continues to face issues. 

The problem originated with the Domain Name System (DNS), which prevented applications from finding the correct address of an AWS cloud database relied upon to store user information and critical data.

Amazon later confirmed that: “All AWS services have returned to normal operation. However, some services still have message backlogs that will be processed over the next few hours.”