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LONDON -- A problem with Amazon's cloud-computing service disrupted internet use around the world Monday, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms. About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover, although problems lingered for some users. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud-computing infrastructure to some of the world's biggest organizations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press. Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said "a slow and bumpy recovery process" is "entirely normal." As engineers roll out fixes across the cloud-computing infrastructure, the process could trigger smaller disruptions, he said. "It's similar to what happens after a large-scale power outage: While a city's power is coming back online, neighborhoods may see intermittent glitches as crews finish the repairs," said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system that converts web addresses into IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. Those addresses allow websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices. DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received more than 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies. Users reported trouble with the social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, the online broker Robinhood and the McDonald's app, as well as Netflix, Disney+ and many other services. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Signal chat app both said on X that they were experiencing trouble related to the outage. Amazon's own services were also affected. Users of the company's Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle. Many college and K-12 students were unable to submit or access their homework or course materials Monday because the AWS outage knocked out Canvas, a widely used educational platform. "I currently can't grade any online assignments, and my students can't access their online materials" because of the outage's effect on learning-management systems, said Damien P. Williams, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The exact number of schools impacted was not immediately known, but Canvas says on its website it is used by 50% of college and university students in North America, including all Ivy League schools in the U.S. Ohio State University informed its 70,000 students at all six campuses by email Monday morning that online course materials might be inaccessible because of the outage and that "students should connect with their instructors for any alternative plans." By late afternoon, the system was still down, said spokesman Benjamin Johnson. This is not the first time issues with Amazon cloud services have caused widespread disruptions. Many popular internet services were affected by a brief outage in 2023. AWS's longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when a wide range of companies -- from airlines and auto dealerships to payment apps and video-streaming services -- were affected for more than five hours. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017. The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern time, when AWS reported on its "health dashboard" that it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region." Later, the company reported that there were "significant error rates" and that engineers were "actively working" on the problem. Around 6 a.m. Eastern time, the company reported seeing recovery across most of the affected services and said it was seeking a "full resolution." As of midday, AWS was still working to resolve the trouble. Sixty-four internal AWS services were affected, the company said. Because much of the world now relies on three or four companies to provide the underlying infrastructure of the internet, "when there's an issue like this, it can be really impactful" across many online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. "The world now runs on the cloud," Burgess said. And because so much of the online world's plumbing is underpinned by so few companies, when something goes wrong, "it's very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don't see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox," Burgess said. "The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast" to resolve, and there's no indication that it was caused by a cyberattack, Burgess said. "This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue. Something's gone wrong, and it will be fixed by Amazon," he said. DOMINO EFFECT Experts said the disruption showed again how the internet's reliance on a few major technology providers -- including Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- can mean disruptions for millions of users when one service breaks down. Last year, a much wider, daylong internet outage was caused by a faulty update sent out by a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN which provides VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, said he woke up to several emails from soldiers on the front lines asking what had caused the disruption. The problem extends to other governments, many of which rely on such cloud services, he said. "If your entire nation's infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that's an exceedingly dangerous situation," he said. "Everyone takes it for normal," Halpin said, referring to the internet's dependence on a handful of providers. "But it's not normal." Some media advocates said the outage, which caused disruptions to secure communications apps and other digital tools, showed that there was an urgent need for diversification in cloud computing. "The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies," Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, said in a statement. Despite the disruption, Amazon shares rose 1.6% by close of Monday trading, suggesting investors were not too bothered about the outage. In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services accounted for nearly 20% of Amazon's sales, but about 60% of its operating profit. Amazon's cloud-computing division has infrastructure around the world. By using Amazon's service instead of building their own, clients can scale up or down without having to invest heavily in costly hardware. Rebecca Wright, a professor in computer science at Barnard College in New York City, said smaller companies benefited from their reliance on cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, which have the right expertise. "There's definitely trade-offs, but I would not say that the solution is to tell companies, Don't outsource your cybersecurity to a company with cybersecurity expertise,'" she said. Mehdi Daoudi, the founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company, said that two decades ago, many companies had their own data centers. Today, he said, most rely on Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Chinese companies for cloud services -- though over the last two or three years, the rising costs of those services have prompted some companies to go back to relying on their own infrastructure. The latest outage could add urgency to demands for companies and governments to rely on cloud services in their regions. Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, said after the disruption Monday that crucial European data and digital infrastructure should be hosted in Europe, by European companies under EU jurisdiction. The outage, she said, was a "stark reminder that Europe's digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience." Information for this article was contributed by Kelvin Chan, Barbara Ortutay and Mustakim Hasnath of The Associated Press and by Jenny Gross of The New York Times.
