A disruption involving Amazon Web Services, the cloud service provider that powers much of the internet, took many websites and apps offline for over two hours on Monday, in the latest outage that showed the fragility of the global technology infrastructure.
The disruption affected websites and apps for some major banks, gaming sites and entertainment services starting shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. Amazon said in an update at 5:27 a.m. that most websites and apps relying on its services were working normally again, and that it continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”
Major services were affected, including WhatsApp, the British government’s website and government tax services, the payment app Venmo, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and games at The New York Times. Dozens of other companies and retailers — including Amazon, Venmo, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells and McDonald’s — also experienced service interruptions.
It was not immediately clear what led to the outage, and there were no indications that it had been caused by a cyberattack.
Experts said that the disruption showed again how the internet’s reliance on a few major technology providers — including Amazon, Microsoft and Google — can affect millions of users when one service breaks down. Last year, a much wider, daylong internet outage was caused by a faulty update sent out by a little known cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike.
Amazon Web Services counts thousands of clients who rely on it for complex, demanding, data-intensive operations including streaming video, running web applications and storing huge amounts of digital information. Amazon’s cloud-computing division has set up infrastructure all around the world, allowing companies to make their products accessible to customers across the globe. By renting the service, clients can scale up or down without having to invest in otherwise costly hardware.
In its initial statement on the outage, Amazon’s said early Monday that 28 of its services, including those in the “US-EAST-1” region, were having issues and that its engineers had been working on limiting the effects and identifying the cause.
Rob Jardin, the chief digital officer at NymVPN, a virtual private network service, said that early indications were that the outage may have been caused by a technical fault affecting one of Amazon’s main data centers.
“Outages of this scale expose our overreliance on centralized infrastructures,” he said in a statement. “The internet was originally designed to be decentralized and resilient, yet today so much of our online ecosystem is concentrated in a small number of cloud regions.”
Some media advocates said that the outage, which caused disruptions to secure communications apps such as Signal and other digital tools, showed how the internet’s reliance on a few major technology companies posed a risk to free speech.
“When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it,” Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, said in a statement. She added that there was an urgent need for diversification in cloud computing. “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
Still, Amazon’s share price barely moved in premarket trading, suggesting that investors were not too bothered about the outage. In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services accounted for nearly 20 percent of Amazon’s sales, but about 60 percent of its operating profit.
Melissa Eddy in Berlin and Andrés R. Martínez in Seoul contributed reporting.
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
The post Amazon Disruption Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours appeared first on New York Times.
