An Amazon Web Services outage has been causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many apps, websites, governments, universities and companies.
On Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Amazon Alexa, Amazon Prime, Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald's app and many others.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on the site where it provides updates that services in its eastern U.S. region were disrupted and engineers were working to understand what was causing the problem.
But at 5:27 a.m. EDT, AWS began reporting progress, saying, "We are seeing significant signs of recovery."
A little more than a half-hour later, it said, "We continue to observe recovery across most" of the affected services.
And at 6:35 a.m. EDT, AWS said, "The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now," but said some requests might be slowed "while we work toward full resolution."
And just before 7 a.m. EDT, that AWS site simply said, "No recent issues."
Many sites and apps tracked by Downdetector were showing significant reductions in reported issues at about 6:15 a.m. EDT.
AWS customers include some of the world's biggest businesses and organizations.
"So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there's an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum" of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
