Was there a cyber attack today? Was this the cause of the huge AWS internet outage - what has Amazon Web Services said
Many of the world’s biggest apps and websites suddenly stopped working today after a huge internet outage.
Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva were all suffering problems, according to tracking website Down Detector. The issues began around 8am in the UK, or midnight pacific time.
The problems appear to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers infrastructure that underpins much of the modern internet. A spokesperson for HMRC, the UK tax authority, has confirmed that its online service has been disrupted by the problem at Amazon Web Services.
An HMRC spokesperson said: “We’re aware that customers are having problems accessing our online services, as part of global issues affecting Amazon Web Services. We’re working urgently with them on this matter. Our phonelines are currently busy as a result, so for anything that isn’t urgent we recommend calling at a later time.”
Amazon Web Services report that they are seeing “significant signs of recovery” in the operational issue that appears to have disrupted services across the internet today. 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.”
It previously said: “We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services. During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution. We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”
When there’s a big outage of this kind, it’s always tempting to wonder whether it’s the result of a cyber attack. There is nothing to indicate at the moment that this is a cyber attack.
Amazon Web Services doesn’t seem to know exactly what the problem is, and there has been nothing explicit to rule it out, but there is no reason to believe yet that it was an intentional hack. 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.”