Amazon Web Services says it has fixed the underlying cause – but many of the world’s biggest websites will be reeling from the outage which put them out of action for much of the day.
The outage hit early today, and affected companies as varied as Snapchat, Roblox, Zoom, Coinbase, HMRC and even banking services like Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax.
The root of the problem was a malfunction at Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing division, whose infrastructure underpins millions of large companies’ websites and platforms.
While outages affecting web platforms and services are nothing new, multiple sites going down in one single outage are somewhat less common – but experts say they are becoming more frequent, according to our technology reporter Liv McMahon.
With much of our lives being online these days, the pressure on cloud services is only increasing all the time, writes technology reporter Shiona McCallum – and events like these highlight the fragility of these systems.
AWS now says its cloud division has “returned to normal operations” and Downdetector reports of AWS issues have trailed off. Now the blame game starts as companies start to try and recoup losses from today, says our North America technology correspondent Lily Jamali.
