WASHINGTON, DC – A major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday caused widespread disruptions to websites, apps, and online platforms around the world, impacting everything from video conferencing and social media to smart home devices.
Popular services including Zoom, Snapchat, and Amazon’s own Alexa were among those affected. The outage, which began around 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time, briefly appeared to be resolved, but Amazon later confirmed the issues had resurfaced, continuing to leave many services offline.
The company has been issuing regular updates as engineers work to restore full functionality.
Shortly after 11:00 a.m., AWS stated we have “narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers. We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”
By midday, the company reported progress.
"We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT,” Amazon said.
The outage had far-reaching implications, affecting universities, businesses, governments, and media organizations that rely heavily on AWS infrastructure to operate. Many were forced offline, underscoring the scale of global dependency on Amazon’s cloud computing services.
