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An issue with Amazon Web Services caused mass disruption that hit dozens of platforms including Snapchat, Canva, Xero, Fortnite, Duolingo, Grammarly and others. Downdetector shows thousands of issues were recorded within an hour about 8pm on Monday. In an update, Amazon Web Services (AWS) advised “significant error rates” for requests were made to its data storage service DynamoDB in the “US-EAST-1 Region.” “During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases,” the update stated. “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.” Cyber Insider reported the region was one of AWS’s most critical and most used data centre hubs that powered large amounts of traffic and infrastructure in the US. “Disruptions here often cascade into widespread service degradation for both consumer-facing and enterprise applications,” Cyber Insider reported. Telstra have advised their services have not been impacted by the outage. Optus said its fixed and mobiles services were not affected, but data services that relied on AWS infrastructure were interrupted during the outage. Business software giant Xero was hit, with the outage locking out customers. “We’re aware of an issue preventing some customers from logging into Xero,” the company said in a status update during the breakdown. “This is related to an issue with our third party provider, Amazon Web Services, who are investigating this with urgency.” Some of its customers began logging back into its platform just after 8pm. AWS provides series to online applications, an online storage service known as Amazon S3 and a remote compute or cloud computing platform called EC2. AWS is owned and operated by online retail giant Amazon.com. The company’s own platforms have been affected by the outage including Prime Video and Alexa, as well as multiple banks and government services in the UK. The Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds were all offline during the outage. Other online financial services have reported issues with their platform including cryptocurrency provider Coinbase. “Our team is working on the issue and we’ll provide updates here. All funds are safe,” Coinbase advised users on X. AI company Perplexity reported it was working to restore its services that were “down right now” due to an “AWS issue.” Meanwhile, the popular language-learning website and app Duolingo has been caught up in the outage. The website currently reads it is down for a “quick maintenance break!” AWS reported they were starting to observe signs of recovery across most of its affected services about 9pm on Monday. “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” a statement said on its website. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. “We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.” The tech company said most requests should now be succeeding.
