Major AWS Outage Hits Disney+, Reddit, Roku, More

UPDATE: Amazon’s Web Services provided an update at 6:35 a.m. ET that says the outage happened due to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. It says “most” operations have now returned to normal, but warns “some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”

Downdetector says it received over 6.5 million global reports of connectivity problems, including 1.4 million+ from the US and 800K+ in the UK.

“The lesson here is resilience,” says Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at Ookla. “Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.”

Those incidents, he says, are probably “becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services, [but] this kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year.”

An earlier version of this story also said users were reporting issues with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. A spokesperson for T-Mobile told PCMag no outage or service disruption happened on its network. “Our customers had issues when trying to use other sites or services due to a third party’s outage early this morning.”

It’s likely users mistakenly believed their carriers were at fault, but the services they were trying to access were experiencing the outage. AT&T and Verizon have yet to comment on the outage.

Original Story:
Finding it tough to reach your favorite sites or apps today? A major internet outage is affecting many of the world’s most popular online services, restricting millions of users around the world.

Popular services like Canva, Coinbase, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Lyft, Reddit, Roku, Signal, Slack, Snapchat, Venmo, and more began reporting issues around 2 a.m. ET on Oct. 20.

It’s also impacting gamers with the Epic Games Store and PlayStation Network suffering from problems, alongside titles like Clash Royale, Dead by Daylight, Fortnite, Roblox, and Rocket League.

The issues appear to stem from a problem with Amazon Web Services (AWS). At 5:27 a.m. ET, it said it had found a “potential root cause” for the problem and started rolling out a fix. “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” Amazon says.

Since then, some services appear to be recovering with fewer reported issues. Others have continued to be down, with outage tracking tool Downdetector showing persistent issues for services like Hulu, Roku, HBO Max, and Peloton.

Many of Amazon’s popular services have also been impacted with outages across Alexa, Amazon Music, Blink, Prime Video, and Ring smart home products. Previous AWS-related outages have seen slow but steady recoveries over several hours, so you may need patience when trying to use tools today.

(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)

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