Amazon.com said on Monday afternoon that its main cloud services are back to normal after a global internet outage. The problem affected thousands of websites and platforms throughout the world, including big ones like Snapchat and Reddit.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said that most of its services were working, but the company also said that some apps were still dealing with a backlog of messages that could take a few more hours to clear completely.
What caused the outage and what it meant
The troubles were caused by problems with the Domain Name System (DNS), which made it hard for applications to get the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API. DynamoDB is an important cloud database that many apps utilize to store user information and other important data.
At first, AWS thought the outage was caused by a subsystem that keeps an eye on the status of its network load balancers, which are used to efficiently spread traffic over several servers. The problem started in the EC2 internal network, which is Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service that gives you cloud capacity on demand.
The disruption, which was said to be the biggest since last year’s CrowdStrike failure, stopped people from doing their daily duties, such buying plane tickets or using digital payment apps, from London to Tokyo. Even after the first update, users said they still had problems using applications like Venmo and Zoom.
This is at least the third time in five years that AWS’s US-EAST-1 cluster in northern Virginia has caused a catastrophic internet crash.
Services that were affected and how to fix them
Amazon said that “all AWS services returned to normal operations” not much after 3 p.m. PT (2200 GMT). The business did say, though, that “Some services, like AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect, still have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.”
The database network problem affected a huge number of well-known apps and websites, such as:
Social Media and Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Snapchat, and Reddit.
Netflix and Disney are streaming services.
Venmo, an online broker, Robinhood Markets Inc., and the McDonald’s app are all examples of digital wallets.
Tech Platforms include Apple Music and Apple TV from Apple Inc., the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and the Signal communication software.
Users said that their Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers stopped working for a short time, which affected even Amazon’s own infrastructure. According to DownDetector, a website that keeps track of online outages, it got more than 11 million reports of difficulties at more than 2,500 companies around the world.