A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday took down a huge chunk of the internet, affecting popular apps like Fortnite and Snapchat and causing problems for companies around the world.
AWS, Amazon’s massive cloud computing division, is the backbone of the modern internet. It provides the computing power and data storage for millions of websites, apps, and services. When it goes down, the ripple effects are felt everywhere.
In an update, AWS said it was seeing increased “error rates and latencies” for many of its services and that it was working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
The list of affected services was long and varied. The outage tracking website Downdetector showed that Amazon’s own shopping site, Prime Video, and Alexa were all having problems. Popular games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash of Clans were down, as were financial apps like Venmo and Chime. The ride-sharing app Lyft was also down for thousands of users.
The outage even hit the secure messaging app Signal and several major banks and telecom companies in the UK. The incident is a stark reminder of how dependent the world has become on a handful of giant cloud providers. This is the first major internet disruption of this scale since a malfunction at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last year caused similar chaos. Of course, not everyone was affected. Elon Musk, the owner of X, couldn’t resist a quick jab, posting simply, “X works.”
