An outage involving Amazon Web Services, the cloud service provider that supports much of the internet, took many websites and apps offline for over two hours on Monday, in the latest disruption that showed the fragility of global technology infrastructure.
The outage, which affected websites and apps for some major banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, started 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.”
Many popular 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, the game Fortnite, 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. Amazon initially reported an “operational” issue affecting multiple services in Northern Virginia.
Experts said that the disruption showed again how the internet’s reliance on a few major technology providers — including Amazon, Microsoft and Google — can mean disruptions for 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 using Amazon’s service instead of building their own, clients can scale up or down without having to invest heavily in costly hardware.
Harry Halpin, the chief executive of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, said that the issue could have been triggered by a technical fault in one of Amazon’s main data centers. But he added that cloud platforms’ operations are inherently opaque, making it impossible to know the cause unless Amazon disclosed it, including if the cause was a cyberattack.
Dr. Halpin, whose company provides VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, said he woke up to several emails from soldiers on the front lines asking what had caused the disruption. The problem extends beyond Ukraine and applies to other Western governments, many of which rely on such cloud services, he said.
“If your entire nation’s infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that’s an exceedingly dangerous situation,” he said.
“Everyone takes it for normal,” said Dr. Halpin, a former research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to the internet’s dependence on a handful of providers. “But it’s not normal.”
Amazon’s “us-east-1” region in Northern Virginia, where the company reported the problems on Monday, has one of its largest data centers, said Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University in England. “For everyday operations, cloud computing works,” he said. But even one small error, like a faulty update, can take down the entire system, he added.
Some media advocates said that the outage, which caused disruptions to secure communications apps such as Signal and other digital tools, showed that there was an urgent need for diversification in cloud computing.
“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.
“The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies,” she added.
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.
Mehdi Daoudi, the founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company, said that two decades ago, many companies had their own data centers. Today, he said, most rely on Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Chinese companies for cloud services — though over the last two or three years, the rising costs of those services have prompted some companies to go back to relying on their own infrastructure.
The latest outage could add urgency to demands for companies and governments to rely on cloud services in their regions.
Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, said after the disruption on Monday that critical European data and digital infrastructure should be hosted in Europe, by European companies under E.U. jurisdiction.
The outage, she said, was a “stark reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience.”
Melissa Eddy in Berlin, Jeanna Smialek in Brussels and Andrés R. Martínez in Seoul contributed reporting.
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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