Internet outage today: Why is everything down today? Issue at Amazon Web Services affecting major apps including Snapchat, Canva and Duolingo
A major internet outage is affecting dozens of websites, online games and apps including Amazon, Snapchat and Vodafone.
Issues started this morning, and problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services. According to Downdetector, there are more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone.
On its service status page, the company said it was seeing "increased error rates" and delays with "multiple AWS services". Amazon Web Services issued a statement on its website, confirming "increased error rates and latencies" for multiple services.
It previously said: "We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share."
There are now signs of recovery with major apps beginning to work again. The technical problem at Amazon Web Services looks like “an IT issue on the database side,” reports Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at security firm Sophos.
Pilling explains: “When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable. AWS has a far reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset. In this case it looks like it is an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to remedy it as an absolute priority.”
In an operational update, AWS says: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”
AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies worldwide, such as servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development and security. When AWS goes down, so do other websites that use its services, which is an embarrassing blow to the Amazon-owned platform – as these companies, universities, individuals and governments pay to use the services.
According to Dataconomy, the issue appears to stem from problems at Amazon’s massive data center facilities in North Virginia, a critical hub for the global internet. It is currently unclear what the cause of the outage is.