What To Know About Amazon Cloud Service Outage Tuesday

Topline

More than 1,000 people were reporting connectivity issues with Amazon Web Services Tuesday morning after a day of outages plagued thousands of popular apps and websites across the internet.

An AWS logo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

Key Facts

Online tracker Downdetector has seen reports of outages slowly rise Tuesday morning, with more than 1,200 instances reported by 8:50 a.m. EDT.

AWS said in a status update on Monday just before 4 p.m. EDT that all of its services had “returned to normal operations” after much-used sites like Shapchat, Canva, Venmo, Coinbase, Ring doorbell cameras, Roblox and Fortnite were affected throughout the day Monday.

The height of the connectivity issues started just before midnight on Sunday, Oct. 19 and continued through Monday afternoon, with 11.3 million reports of problems from users submitted on Downdetector, according to Michelle Badrian, a senior communications manager at the site’s parent company Ookla.

A majority of reports came from the United States and United Kingdom, and outage reports plummeted Monday evening.

Connectivity issues hit their lowest point at about 4:30 a.m. before slowly creeping back up Tuesday morning.

Get Forbes Breaking News Text Alerts:We’re launching text message alerts so you’ll always know the biggest stories shaping the day’s headlines. Text “Alerts” to (201) 335-0739or sign up here: joinsubtext.com/forbes.

Big Number

2,500. That’s how many individual companies were cited in reports to Downdetector on Monday, Badrian told Forbes.

Key Background

Amazon Web Services is one of the world’s largest cloud service providers, supplying infrastructure for thousands of companies and hosting the data that makes them run. Airlines like United and Delta, restaurants like Starbucks and McDonalds, financial services like Venmo and Coinbase, healthcare services like Medicare and United Healthcare and even the British government (the HM Revenue and Customs website, home to the country’s tax branch) were impacted by the outage. The problem stemmed from an error with Amazon’s EC2 internal network, specifically the technology that distributes traffic across various servers. AWS said all services had returned to normal operations by 3 p.m. Monday but some, like AWS Config (an inventorying and compliance service), Redshift (data warehousing and analytics), and Connect (contact centers and customer service), were continuing to have a backlog of messages that needed to be processed.