Amazon Web Services Experiences Outage, Affects Hosted Apps and Websites

Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage impacting apps and websites it hosts, recovery underway. Amazon commented that the outage is due to an internal technical issue and is working to resolve it. The outage is affecting a number of popular services, including Netflix and Disney+. Amazon is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a major cloud computing platform owned by Amazon.com (AMZN), experienced a significant outage early Monday, impacting a wide array of services and websites that rely on its infrastructure. The outage, which lasted several hours, was due to an operational issue related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint, according to Yahoo Finance. (Yahoo Finance).

The outage disrupted services across multiple industries, including social media, telecommunications, and airlines. Popular services affected include Meta Platforms' (META) Facebook and WhatsApp, Walt Disney's (DIS) Disney+, Snap's (SNAP) Snapchat, the McDonald's (MCD) app, Reddit (RDDT), United Airlines (UAL), AT&T (T), T-Mobile US (TMUS), Roblox (RBLX), and Vodafone (VOD), Benzinga reported. (Benzinga). Downdetector, which tracks online outages, reported that the problem was centered in the US-East-1 region, causing widespread service disruptions.

AWS initially reported increased error rates and latency across multiple services, including EC2, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, ECS, and Glue. The company identified the issue as a DNS resolution failure in DynamoDB's API endpoint, which affected many dependent systems and global services. AWS engineers worked to mitigate the issue, and by 2:22 a.m. PDT, they had applied initial mitigations and were seeing early signs of recovery. Full functionality was restored across all impacted zones by 5:48 a.m. PDT, the Benzinga report noted.

The outage had significant ramifications, affecting more than 70 AWS products and disrupting major websites and applications globally. According to Downdetector and CNBC, the outage impacted services like Netflix, Disney+, Lyft Inc (LYFT), McDonald's (MCD) app, New York Times Company (NYT), Reddit Inc (RDDT), Ring, Robinhood Markets (HOOD), Snap Inc (SNAP) Snapchat, T-Mobile US (TMUS), United Airlines Holdings (UAL), Venmo, and Verizon Communications Inc (VZ), as the Benzinga article detailed. The British government websites, including Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs, also went offline.

Amazon's stock price experienced volatility during the outage. Shares of AMZN were down 0.2% in the most recent premarket activity, but they rebounded to be up 0.69% at $214.47 by Monday's close, the Benzinga piece reported.

AWS has stated that the outage was operational and not security-related. The company is continuing to work towards full recovery and has advised customers to launch new EC2 instances without targeting a specific availability zone to allow AWS to select available capacity automatically, according to Benzinga.