There is currently a massive internet outage taking place, impacting a large number of sites and services. The outage has been traced to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS has confirmed the disruption on its status page, noting “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region”.
The detailed outage notification is available below, shared on Amazon’s AWS Health Dashboard.
Oct 20 1:26 AM PDT
We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.
Oct 20 12:51 AM PDT
We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.
Oct 20 12:11 AM PDT
We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We will provide another update in the next 30-45 minutes.
- More than 35 services are currently impacted. We are seeing widespread reports across the globe of services being down, many reported on X.
Impacted services
One of the best services to turn to during outages is downdector. At the time of writing it’s showing the following services as being impacted:
- AWS
- Amazon.com
- Snapchat
- Roblox
- Epic Games Store
- Life360
- Canva
- Ring
- PlayStation Network
- Rocket League
- Prime Video
- Zoom
- Telstra
- Steam
- Tidal
- Xero
- Perplexity
- EA
- National Broadband Network (NBN)
- Tinder among others.
This is certainly not the first and won’t be the last internet outage, but is a reminder of just how much the world relies on underlying internet infrastructure. Typically these services, often under contract feature 99.999% uptime, meaning annual downtime is measured in just minutes across 365 days.
Amazon’s team will no doubt be working hard on a fix, and finding the root cause of the issue to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
For more information, head to AWS Service Health Dashboard and https://downdetector.com.au
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