Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s largest cloud computing platforms, is at the centre of a massive internet outage affecting websites, online services, and banks globally.
AWS is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that allows companies to rent computing power, storage, and other IT resources over the internet, instead of maintaining their own servers and data centres.
Essentially, AWS provides the backbone for countless websites, applications, and digital services.
The outage has disrupted numerous online services, including banking systems and Ring doorbells, as reported by users and tracking sites such as Downdetector.
Customers have reported outages at several UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland - with 6,925 reports at Lloyds at 9.31am.
Earlier on Monday, AWS reported that it has "identified a potential root cause" for the widespread outage affecting its services.
According to the company, “based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”
DNS resolution is the process that allows companies to connect to AWS servers.
AWS said it is working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Full list of services impacted by AWS disruption
Banks
Lloyds Bank
Halifax
Bank of Scotland
Social media
Snapchat
Signal
Online shopping
Ecommerce
Amazon.com
Whatnot
Venmo
Robinhood
Gaming
Fortnite
Roblox
Clash Royale
Dead by Daylight
Crunchyroll
Prime Video
Smart home
Ring Doorbells
Amazon Alexa
Education
Duolingo
Canva
Perplexity AI
Airtable
Instructure
Government and public services
HMRC
Infrastructure and cloud services
AWS services including EC2, CloudWatch, CloudFront, and VPC Lattice
