A major outage affecting Amazon Web Services has caused disruptions to websites and apps across the world, including many relied on by users in the UK.
The disruption, which was caused by issues in AWS’s US-East-1 Region, affected many apps and websites which rely on AWS infrastructure.
While most reports of issues stemmed from users based in the United States, many of these platforms also service customers around the world, leading to widespread reports of problems in the UK and beyond.
Affected platforms included Signal, Duolingo, Amazon-related websites and subsidiaries, Lloyds Bank, Coinbase, Slack, PlayStation Network, and many more.
In the morning of Monday 20 October, AWS acknowledged that it was seeing increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services which were affecting global services that rely on US-East-1 endpoints.
According to the update issued at 11:35am BST on its status dashboard, AWS said the underlying DNS issues that caused this problem had been fully mitigated, although it added that certain services may still experience disruption while the team works towards “full resolution”.
“Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda,” AWS said.
“While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates.”
“We continue to work toward full resolution,” the company said.
This type of outage, where an issue with a single data centre in the United States affects global services, is exemplary of the dangers of the centralisation of cloud infrastructure.
Enterprise cloud providers, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, host and facilitate the majority of internet-based services across the world.
When a disruption affects one of these giant companies, the ability for applications, websites and messengers around the world to service users are negatively affected.
The internet’s reliance on a few giant cloud service providers has led to calls for cloud services to be diversified or decentralised, and for competition to be incentivised to ensure that large portions of the internet’s applications are not overly reliant on a single company’s infrastructure.
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