AWS Outage Takes Venmo, Snapchat, Ring and Many More Offline

A widespread outage affected Amazon Web Services (AWS), impacting hundreds of popular websites and apps, including Amazon.com, Venmo, McDonald's, Open AI, Roblox, and Robin Hood. The issue, which began around 3:00 a.m. and was largely resolved by 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, stemmed from a DNS resolution problem, essentially a failure in translating web addresses to cloud services. Over 500 companies reported issues, with more than 4 million outage reports, double the usual volume on Down Detector. While the exact cause hasn't been officially detailed by Amazon, the company states the issue has been identified and recovery is underway.

• A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage impacted hundreds of websites and apps.
• Services like Amazon.com, Venmo, McDonald's, Open AI, Roblox, and Robin Hood were affected.
• Over 500 companies reported issues, with more than 4 million outage reports.
• The issue was identified as a DNS resolution problem.
• Recovery efforts began around 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, with most services reporting resolution.

AWS Suffers Massive Outage [00:00]

• A significant outage occurred with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• This outage affected hundreds of popular websites and applications.
• Services like Amazon.com, Venmo, McDonald's, and Canva experienced disruptions.
• Over 500 companies reported issues according to Down Detector.
• More than 4 million outage reports were logged, which is double the usual amount.

This is really reaching a lot of folks this morning.

Impacted Services and Recovery Status [00:31]

• The outage impacted various types of services, including finance apps, ride-hailing, airlines, and educational software like Canva.
• Open AI, Roblox, and Robin Hood were among the companies that reported being back online fully.
• Amazon stated that they had identified the issue and that recovery should be happening.
• The issue appeared to begin around 3:00 a.m. and was largely resolved by around 7:00 a.m. Eastern time.

Amazon does say that they have made a resolution. They identified the issue that basically recovery should be happening right now.

Understanding Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Cause [01:14]

• AWS is explained as Amazon's web hosting service, which provides companies with the infrastructure to get their operations online.
• The technical cause of the outage was identified as a "DNS resolution" problem.
• DNS resolution is described as the process of translating a typed web address (URL) into the cloud services that host the website or app.
• The scope of the outage was noted as smaller than a previous incident involving Microsoft, but still significant due to the number of major companies affected.

Well, AWS is their web hosting services. It's basically uh something that they that they offer to businesses to get their uh companies online.

Incident Timeline and Potential Causes [02:00]

• It is unclear if the outage was caused by an intentional act like a hack or an accident.
• Amazon has not yet provided an official explanation for the incident.
• The situation brought to mind a past incident involving CrowdStrike and Microsoft that impacted computers globally.
• Even Amazon's own website was inaccessible for some users during the outage.

We haven't heard from Amazon exactly why this happened.