Major Amazon Cloud Computing Disruption Impacts Snapchat, Robinhood, and Numerous Other Online Services

Amazon announced that its cloud computing division was on the path to recovery following a significant outage that affected online operations globally on Monday.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as a backbone for remote computing, extending its services to a multitude of clients, including governmental bodies, academic institutions, and businesses like The Associated Press.

According to DownDetector, a platform dedicated to monitoring online disruptions, users encountered difficulties accessing platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, the Robinhood trading app, and even the McDonald’s application. Notably, Coinbase and Signal took to X to acknowledge their struggles, attributing the issues to the AWS disruption.

The initial signs of the problem surfaced around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time when AWS’s Health Dashboard indicated that they were “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

Subsequently, the company noted the presence of “significant error rates” and assured that their engineering team was “actively working” to resolve the issue.

Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said that it was seeing recovery across most of the affected services. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” it said, adding that it is working on a “full resolution.”

AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.