Websites, Apps Affected after Amazon Web Services Outage

By Adedapo Adesanya

Many of the world’s biggest websites and apps were down on Monday due to an outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Services like Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, Canva, and Roblox have all been impacted, according to reports.

Major UK banks were also affected by the outages that impacted websites globally this morning, according to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks internet disruptions.

Customers of banks including Lloyds and Halifax also reported downtime, according to BBC News, monitored by Business Post.

Today’s outage stemmed from Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia, on the East Coast of the US. The location also hosts a lot of other data centres.

The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the US east coast, on DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load.

The site is the tech giant’s original and largest location for its web services. It is known to many as a critical centre for the global internet and is the default region for many users.

AWS controls about 30 per cent of the cloud market share.

However, due to its age, size and amount of on-demand capacity, it is prone to outages.

As of press time, BBC reported that Amazon services were showing signs of recovery after the outage which occured at 11 a.m. Nigerian time.

The development highlights the huge challenge with so many businesses depending on single cloud computing regions from single cloud computing providers.

This may lead to alternative options springing up and companies diversifying their cloud services.