Amazon cloud computing outage disrupts Snapchat, Robinhood and many other online services

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Amazon said its cloud computing service was recovering from a major outage that disrupted online activity around the world on Monday.

Amazon Web Services provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.

On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services. Coinbase and Signal both said on X that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.

The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

Later the company reported that there were “significant error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.

Around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, the company said that it was seeing recovery across most of the affected services. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” it said, adding that it is working on a “full resolution.”

AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.