Amazon Web Services outage hits major websites: What we know so far as recovery begins

Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday, taking down numerous big-name websites. Many now are back online.

The outage was first reported at 3:11 a.m. ET in AWS’ main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. A notice on AWS’ status page said it was experiencing DNS problems with DynamoDB, its database service that underpins many other AWS applications.

DNS, or Domain Name System, translates website names to IP addresses so browsers and other applications can load.

AWS cited an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” in an update at 5:01 a.m. ET. More than 70 of its own services were affected.

Shortly afterward, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery.”

By 6:35 a.m. ET, AWS said in an update that the DNS issue had been “fully mitigated” and that AWS service operations “are succeeding normally now.”

However, as of 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS said it had detected “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services.” APIs, or application programming interfaces, are the mechanisms that allow different software programs to interact.

AWS is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for around a third of the market, ahead of Microsoft and Google, according to Synergy Research Group. Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS for cloud computing services, such as servers and storage.

Major companies hit

The website Downdetector said that user reports indicated problems at sites including Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, the McDonald’s app, The New York Times, Reddit, Ring doorbells, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo and Verizon.

British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs were also experiencing issues, per Downdetector.

A government spokesperson told CNBC: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”

Lloyds Banking Group confirmed that some of its services were affected and asked customers “to bear with us” while it worked to restore them. Some 20 minutes later, it added that services were coming back online.

The outage also brought down critical tools inside Amazon. Warehouse and delivery employees, along with drivers for Amazon’s Flex service, reported on Reddit that internal systems were offline at many sites. Some warehouse workers were instructed to stand by in break rooms and loading areas during their shift, while they couldn’t access Amazon’s Anytime Pay app, which lets employees access a portion of their paycheck immediately.

Seller Central, the hub used by Amazon’s third-party sellers to manage their businesses, was also knocked offline by the outage.

Reddit, too, is “working on scaling Reddit back to 100 percent as we speak,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

Some United and Delta Air Lines customers reported on social media that they couldn’t find their reservations online, check in or drop bags.

Other social media users cited disruption across cloud-based games, including Roblox and Fortnite, while crypto exchange Coinbase said many users were unable to access the service due to the outage.

Graphic design tool Canva said it was “experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva. There is a major issue with our underlying cloud provider.”

Generative artificial intelligence search tool Perplexity was also affected. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.