A major cloud computing service went offline early Monday, causing problems for thousands of websites and services including leading retailers, publishers and games.
Amazon Web Services first reported a problem at 12:11 a.m. PT (3:11 a.m. ET) and said it was dealing with an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services in its center in northern Virginia.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the AWS health dashboard said.
At 5:27 a.m. ET the dashboard said there were “significant signs of recovery” with most attempts to reach websites and services succeeding, despite a large backlog.
Social media posts reported problems with cloud-based games such as Roblox and Fortnite; social networks including Snapchat; Amazon.com and Prime Video; the digital Ring doorbell service, among many others.
Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said its services was unavailable because of the AWS outage.
Media organizations including Disney and the New York Times were also apparently affected, according to Downdetector.
AWS customers were unable to report the problem because its automated support ticking system was also offline.
The problem stems from an error with DynamoDB, a system for managing database tables and indexes, AWS said.
At 5 a.m. ET the dashboard said AWS engineers had “identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs” and were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
The dashboard added that global services that use AWS services ultimately hosted by its the US-EAST-1 servers may also be experiencing problems.
AWS stores customers’ data and offers a range of online activities and is a major player in the cloud computing, having recently invested in AI products. It’s also highly lucrative, making $107 billion in the 2024 financial year, 17% of Amazon’s total revenue.
This is a developing story — check back here for updates soon.
