Amazon Web Services Outage Persists, Hindering Major Sites and Apps

AWS first reported disruption to its services shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern time Monday. (Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services)

Key Points

• An Amazon Web Services outage on Monday disrupted numerous websites and social media platforms, including Snapchat, Reddit, and Roblox.
• AWS identified the root cause as an internal subsystem monitoring network load balancers, affecting its US-East-1 region in northern Virginia.
• Amazon Web Services holds nearly 38% of the public cloud services market share, according to Gartner, with Microsoft at 24%.

A major Amazon Web Services outage threw much of the internet into disarray on Monday as popular websites and social-media platforms struggled to recover.

The world’s largest cloud provider said in an update at 1:38 p.m. Eastern time that it was seeing “early signs of recovering” across a few availability zones in the Eastern U.S., adding that it was in the process of “applying mitigations…at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside.”

AWS said in an earlier update that it had narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues. “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” the company wrote. “We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”

The cloud provider first reported increased error rates for multiple AWS services in its “US-East-1 region” in northern Virginia shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Monday. Popular social media and gaming platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, and Roblox were among those affected, while the McDonald’s app also experienced disruptions.

Crypto exchange Coinbase assured users that all funds were safe. “We are aware that customers are unable to use many core functions of Coinbase, such as Trading and Transfers due to ongoing issues with AWS,” the company wrote on its status page at 1:55 p.m. “We will continue to investigate and provide another update.”

The websites of several Dow Jones titles including Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch were impacted, though all three sites were back online as of Monday afternoon.

AWS indicated that global services relying on the region’s infrastructure could also face issues. The cloud provider reported “significant signs of recovery” at 5:30 a.m. ET, followed by an update that most operations had been recovered by 7 a.m. ET.

The outage also had consequences for passengers flying with United Airlines , who reported problems accessing United’s website and app early Monday. The issue, which United described as a “system glitch” and then a “technology outage,” resulted in minor flight delays.

“The global outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted access to the United app and website overnight, and some internal United systems were temporarily affected,” a United spokesperson told Barron’s. “United implemented backup systems to end the technology disruption and our teams are working to get our customers on their way.”

AWS was the worldwide leader in the public cloud services market last year, accounting for nearly 38% of the market share, according to research firm Gartner. Microsoft was the next largest provider at 24% market share.

Amazon shares gained 1.6% on Monday. The benchmark S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed up 1.1% and 1.4%, respectively.

Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com and Callum Keown at callum.keown@dowjones.com