Key Takeaways
- A large-scale Global AWS outage is causing broad disruption to popular apps and websites.
- Platforms affected include Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, Duolingo, and even Amazon’s own Alexa.
- This is a reminder about the heavy and critical dependence of the modern internet on larger central cloud infrastructure services.
Table of Contents
Global AWS Outage Creates Widespread Disruption Across Digital Services
A massive AWS outage has taken down a large part of the internet that impacted popular services from social media to gaming and finance. The interruption began early in the morning of October 20th, UTC, with Amazon stating on their cloud division page there were “increased error rates” and bigger latency in multiple services.
The Global AWS outage has caused a domino effect, showing how a single point of failure in a core piece of the internet infrastructure can have a huge impact on millions of users around the world.
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The Domino Effect on Major Platforms
The incident has spread to some of the most popular services in the world. Major social media app Snapchat was down, as well as gaming platforms Fortnite and Roblox, the language learning service Duolingo, and payment app Venmo. Even Amazon services such as Alexa and Prime Video experienced outages. So far, the incident demonstrates the sheer scale of AWS’s market power, whereby a technical error could take out a vast range of unrelated online services at the same time.
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A Clear Warning of the Risks of Centralization
This Global AWS outage is a clear warning of the fragility of the internet. As companies continue to consolidate around a small number of cloud providers in the name of efficiency, they take on a significant systemic risk. This situation has sparked new conversations about the necessity of decentralizing and building more resilient web architectures to prevent a single company’s technical issues from effectively taking down “half the internet” in a single stroke.
FAQs
Which major services are confirmed to be down following the global AWS outage?
Some confirmed outages include Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Duolingo, Venmo, Coinbase, Alexa, and Canva, to name a few, according to both Downdetector and company status pages.
What is AWS, and why does its outage cause so many problems?
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the world’s largest cloud computing provider. It hosts the backend infrastructure for thousands of apps and websites, so when it experiences problems, all the services that depend on it are affected simultaneously.
Has Amazon provided an update on the cause?
As the outage developed, Amazon stated there were “increased error rates” shown on the AWS status dashboard, but there still has not been a detailed root-cause analysis. Many of the affected companies stated that there was an “AWS operational issue” that created all of the issues.
For more AWS-related stories, read: AWS Outage Disrupts Binance and KuCoin, Sparks Centralization Debate
