Amazon Web Services today has caused global disruption after it went down in Virginia, and the internet is still reeling from it. At one point this morning, headlines announced “half the internet” was down – and it literally felt like it was. For hours, so much was affected due to AWS going down and the disruption has now reached a height of 6.5 million reports of internet stuff being down. But just what actually is AWS, and why is Amazon Web Services vital to so much of these huge internet companies operating? Here’s what we know about AWS bringing the internet outage down today and what Amazon Web Services has said about its recovery.
Things still aren’t normal
According to Down Detector, here’s what’s being reported as having major issues:
Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Canva, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Duolingo, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, Playstation, Pokémon Go.
There have also been reports people are unable to get onto their mobile banking apps – with Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland all reporting issues on Down Detector.
Via Down Detector
Most things seemed like they were coming back to normal, but now it seems shakier and people are wondering what Amazon Web Services have said and why AWS is so important to all of these applications running smoothly and not causing the entire internet outage feeling like the world’s gone down in flames.
Amazon has said as we enter the sixth hour of stuff being down that “We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services … We are investigating.
“We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network. We continue to investigate and identify mitigations.
According to Reuters, Amazon are struggling to fully fix the issue. To aid the recovery, AWS said it was putting in place limits on the number of requests that can be made on its platform which should try and make things a bit smoother. But people are still having issues.
Apparently, a third of the internet runs on AWS – which is obviously massive. If like me you had no clue what AWS was really, here’s a simple explainer. AWS is basically the internet’s giant computer rental service, run by Amazon. Instead of every company having to buy and maintain its own physical servers (which are expensive and take up space), they can just rent computing power, storage, and databases from Amazon’s data centres all over the world. So when it goes down, chaos occurs.
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