Individual customers and businesses around the world were today impacted by an outage at cloud powerhouse Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The system reported elevated error-rates and latency issues in its US-EAST-1 region, which cascaded globally.
A variety of applications affected
The incident began to emerge around 0800 BST when users started reporting widespread problems accessing services that rely on AWS infrastructure.
A host of major platforms, from gaming (such as Fortnite) and social media (Snapchat) to smart-home devices (Ring doorbells) and financial services (including Lloyds Bank in the UK) reported outages or degraded performance.
A West Midlands marketing firm said: ‘Several of our graphic design and cloud storage systems have been inaccessible, making our work extremely difficult at a very busy time.’
Still under investigation
AWS’s own status updates confirmed that multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region were “investigating increased error rates and latencies”.
The ripple effect has acted as a reminder of how interconnected the digital ecosystem is, with a single cloud region’s underperformance impacting countless downstream services worldwide.
Work underway to mitigate disruption
While AWS engineers are actively working to mitigate the disruption, no precise resolution timeline has been published so far.
For businesses and consumers alike, the outage is a cautionary tale: even infrastructure giants are vulnerable, and resilience may demand multi-region architecture or backup strategies.
Consumers experiencing issues are advised to check the AWS Health Dashboard for updates and monitor downstream service status pages.
