Internet users on Monday afternoon continued to report issues with platforms that rely on Amazon Web Services, hours after Amazon’s cloud computing unit said it was recovering from an outage that started earlier in the day.
The Amazon division provides remote computing services to many apps, websites, governments, universities and companies. Early Monday, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many others, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Even Amazon’s own services weren’t immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers posted on DownDetector that they weren’t working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.
By mid-morning, Amazon said it had started to recover, but around 1 p.m. ET, users were still reporting problems. Thousands of Venmo users reported difficulties at about 1:30 p.m. ET, while people also reported problems with AI chatbot Claude, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon services like Alexa around the same time, according to Downdetector.
Some companies and apps posted on social media to alert their users that the AWS outage was impacting their services.
“An Amazon Web Services outage is impacting information in Transit app. The length of disruption is currently unknown. We apologize for any inconvenience,” said RTC Southern Nevada, the transit authority for the region, on X at 1:54 p.m. ET.
Amazon said on the site where it provides updates that root cause of the issue was a “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”
The outage also had ripple effects in the travel industry, with major airline carriers reporting issues.
A Southwest spokesperson said the outage affected the airline’s ability to efficiently dispatch some early morning flights, while United said it disrupted customers’ access to the United app and website overnight. Delta said the issue caused a small numbers of minor delays Monday morning.
The nation’s railroad services were also affected. Amtrak reported at 1:30 p.m. EDT that it was experiencing “intermittent technical difficulties” which hobbled SMS, email and push notifications, and prevented customers from booking reservations through Amtrak.com or the mobile app.
“If you are traveling today, please arrive at your station at your regularly scheduled time typically 30 minutes prior to your train’s departure,” Amtrak said in a statement shared with CBS News.
Amazon and Amazon Web Services did not immediately return a request for comment.
How did this start?
Amazon first reported the outage issue at 3:11 a.m. ET. Shortly after, it said its services in its eastern U.S. region were disrupted and engineers were working to understand what was causing the problem. At 5:27 a.m. ET, AWS began reporting progress, saying, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery.”
A little more than a half-hour later, it said, “We continue to observe recovery across most” of the affected services.
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.
“The world now runs on the cloud” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.
And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.
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