Copyright NBC 5 Chicago
What happened that caused an outage for thousands of websites and apps Monday morning? Amazon Web Services went offline early Monday, leading to issues and errors for popular websites and apps like Snapchat, Starbucks, Ring, Chime, Roblox, Fortnite and more. The outage underlined the fragility of companies — including financial services — that use cloud-based servers to host their data, and how suddenly businesses across the globe can be impacted by an unplanned outage. So what exactly happened? What caused the outage? The errors began just after 2 a.m. CT, when Amazon Web Services said it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies" for multiple sites. By 5:35 a.m. CT, the company said the problem had been "fully mitigated," but warned "some requests may be throttled" as work continued. Local In a recent update, the cloud computing service said it had "narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues." The outage impacted "AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region." "The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said just before 11 a.m. CT. In its latest update, AWS said it had taken steps to mitigate the issues and was "seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. What is AWS? Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service. "Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services," its website stated. Which websites were down? The issue impacted thousands of websites and apps across the globe. The website DownDetector showed users reporting issues with Reddit, Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite, Amazon, Starbucks, Facebook and more. Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said its services was unavailable because of the AWS outage. Customers of the service also couldn't report the issues because the service's automated support ticking system was also offline. The city of Elmhurst said the outage was impacting city services. "Several City services that residents and customers rely on may experience intermittent issues today due to a global outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS). At this time, all services appear to be functional, but we are advising the public that services may be interrupted as the issues are resolved," the city wrote on Facebook. "We appreciate your patience and understanding as this issue is addressed."
