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Amazon’s cloud business suffered significant “errors and connectivity issues” on Monday, causing a widespread outage that forced customers’ apps and websites offline.
The Seattle-based group said it had fixed the underlying issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS) early on Monday morning, and that the disruptions to its services were “resolved” by the evening.
“All AWS services [have] returned to normal operations,” the company said.
The outage hit a range of groups from ride-hailing app Lyft and coffee chain Starbucks to Lloyds Bank and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
AWS — the world’s largest cloud provider rents server space to businesses to run their online services — blamed the issues on faults at its data centre hub in northern Virginia.
Problems with an Amazon database service known as DynamoDB left systems unable to match website names with the numerical IP addresses required to load apps and web pages.
The outage highlighted how dependent the internet has become on a handful of Big Tech companies.
Other groups hit by Monday’s outage included Snapchat, the crypto exchange Coinbase and BT, according to Downdetector.com.
The London Stock Exchange Group’s data services also reported problems linked to the AWS fault, along with the website of HM Revenue & Customs, the British tax authority.
Some of Amazon’s own business, such as its Ring video-doorbell service, and Alexa, its digital voice assistant, were also affected.
Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos, said the disruption caused by the outage “does show us how pervasive services like AWS are in supporting the apps and services that we use every day”.
Hours after reporting an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” early on Monday, AWS said the problem had been “fully mitigated”.
But users continued to experience errors accessing numerous websites as the cloud giant gradually brought services back online.
Coinbase cited “early signs of recovery”. The Lloyds banking app was also accessible after earlier problems.
AWS later said it was still experiencing connectivity issues and was taking additional steps to aid the recovery of a “internal subsystem” that had failed.
The problems were resolved by Monday evening, the company said, and most of its services had “fully recovered”. It added some services “continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours”.
AWS, which leads Microsoft and Google in cloud computing services, is a big profit driver for Amazon, with analysts forecasting the division will generate more than $126bn in revenue this fiscal year.
The parent group has pledged to invest at least $100bn in the business this year, the bulk of which will be spent on building data centres to train and deploy artificial intelligence-enabled applications.
Pilling added there was no indication of a malicious attack, but advised users to be cautious when opening any links purporting to be from AWS as cyber criminals might seek to take advantage of the situation.
