Amazon disruption brought websites and apps to a standstill

A major failure at the internet giant Amazon has affected dozens of websites, online games and apps including Snapchat, Reddit and Fortnite as well as business applications like Slack and Zoom .

Amazon reported an outage in the Amazon service DynamoDB on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) status page on Monday morning. As a result, increased error rates and delays occurred in a further 29 AWS services. As a result, many services such as Snapchat, which are based on AWS technology, were unavailable.

“Most services are back to normal”

The first signs of the all-clear came on Monday afternoon. “We are seeing clear signs of improvement,” the AWS status page said. An hour later, another status light turned green: “Most AWS services are now running normally again. Some requests may still be a little slower while we work to fully resolve the issue.”

Signal President Meredith Whittaker had previously pointed out that their messenger service had been affected by a disruption at AWS. “We know that some of you may not have Signal running right now. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stay tuned,” Whittaker wrote on Bluesky.

AWS leads the Big Five

The Amazon subsidiary is the world’s leading provider of cloud computing services – ahead of Microsoft
Azure, Google Cloud as well as the Chinese providers Alibaba and Tencent. As the market leader, AWS provides the virtual infrastructure for a significant part of the Internet. The Amazon subsidiary’s services are particularly popular with start-ups because they can rent the required IT resources such as computing power, storage space, databases or special software functions for AI from AWS via the Internet. However, this circumstance means that in the event of a major AWS disruption, several websites and apps come to their knees.

Many services disrupted

The consequences of the AWS outage for several dozen providers could be seen on the portal alletreib.de. On the one hand, Amazon services themselves were affected, such as Amazon Alexa, Amazon Prime and Amazon Music, Ring and the shopping portal Amazon.de. The AI ​​portal Perplexity was also temporarily disrupted. At times there were also disruptions to the payment service provider Venmo, the stock trading app Robinhood and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase
. Many smaller providers such as the language learning app Duolingo were also affected.

By Monday afternoon, most services were back to normal. Messages in Signal reach recipients again. Users can log back into Snapchat or trade Bitcoin at Coinbase. However, various services may still experience disruptions or limited functionality.