An outage at Amazon’s cloud services division, AWS, left more than 1,000 businesses struggling to provide online services, with companies from Lloyds Bank to Snapchat reporting problems.
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, provides on-demand computing power and data storage to businesses around the world.
The problems started early Monday morning when users reported problems accessing numerous websites.
By midday, Amazon said it had identified the problem and was working on a fix, but many companies using AWS were still struggling to recover.
Downdetector, which monitors users who report problems with online services, said more than 4 million users reported problems with websites on Monday.
Amazon’s own services, including its shopping website Prime Video, Alexa and Ring doorbells, were also affected.
The AWS issue is the most high-profile internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike incident, which affected technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports worldwide.
It has once again highlighted that just a handful of companies control the underlying infrastructure for our digital lives, with a problem with any of them having the potential to wreak havoc across many industries.
What did Amazon say?
Amazon has said the problem is related to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem, which translates human-readable Internet addresses into machine-readable Internet addresses that a computer can understand.
DNS systems work like an address book, so when a human types in an Internet website or taps a button in an app, the DNS translates that into information for the computer, then matches it with the relevant address and loads it.
After posting a series of updates acknowledging the issue, the tech giant said the issue had been resolved and services were recovering.
Amazon said: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully resolved and most AWS service operations are now running normally… We continue to work toward a full resolution.”
What do experts say?
Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the problem appeared to be with one of the networking systems that AWS uses to control a database product.
“As this issue can usually be resolved centrally… unless further issues are identified, the issue should be resolved in the coming hours,” he said.
AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage originated at the US-EAST-1 site in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site experienced previous outages in 2021 and 2020.
Professor Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, UCL, said: “The Amazon Web Service outage is a timely reminder of how deeply our economies are now dependent on just a handful of cloud infrastructures.”
“The challenge is just as great for users. Too many people still view the cloud as a single point of reliability rather than as an environment of shared responsibility.”
Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer at NordVPN, agrees, highlighting how fragile our online world really is, with many businesses relying on a very small number of cloud providers to stay online.
He said: “Disruptions like this highlight a serious problem with the way some of the world’s largest companies often rely on the same digital infrastructure, meaning that if one domino falls, they all do.
“From streaming services to online banking, much of our digital life depends on just a few cloud providers.
“While Amazon Web Services may have already found the technical flaw, this still provides an excellent opportunity for hackers to look for vulnerabilities, while defenses for affected businesses may be down.
Many apps were offline this morning due to the AWS outage (Getty)
Professor James Davenport, professor of information technology at the University of Bath, said it was alarming that UK banks were reliant on US cloud technology.
Lloyds Bank’s services were disrupted by the AWS outage.
Professor Davenport told the Daily Mail that British banks should limit their use to British, or at least European, regions.
He said: “Obviously this is having an impact now, but it could mean some customer data is being processed in the US or it could potentially infer customer usage patterns even if it’s not actual banking data, we don’t know.
“This seems to indicate some kind of unexpected dependency (easy enough to happen, but a good cloud audit should have caught this if Lloyds itself is responsible – possibly a third party dependency that Lloyds has not protected itself from). Worrying in any case.”
Some of the companies affected by the AWS problem. (Down detector)
For companies with a strong online presence, today’s outage is a reminder not to be too reliant on one cloud provider, said Charlotte Wilson, head of business at cybersecurity firm Check Point Software.
Wilson said: “Today’s outage is yet another reminder that the digital world doesn’t stop at borders – a local outage can happen globally in minutes. We’ve built convenience on shared systems, but resilience still depends on people and processes.
“For individuals, this means having good backups, keeping important information offline, and knowing alternative ways to connect or pay if systems go down. Stay alert to scams or phishing attempts, especially when banking sites are offline, and never click on links or share data you don’t recognize.
“For organizations, it’s time to diversify. Don’t keep everything in one cloud. Test your failovers, train your teams, and plan for downtime before it happens. As companies rush to restore access, systems and staff are overloaded, and that’s when attackers strike. Expect a spike in fake ‘refund’ or ‘discount offers’, phishing emails and scam links that claim to solve the problem.
Could it be a cyber attack?
There is currently no indication that this is a cyber attack, and Amazon described the issue as a technical issue.
Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cyber security firm Sophos, said: “When something like this happens, the concern that it is a cyber incident is understandable.
“AWS has a far-reaching and complicated footprint, so any issue can cause major problems. In this case, it appears it is an IT issue on the database side, and they will be working to resolve this as an absolute priority.”
