Amazon’s cloud business hit by widespread outage

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Amazon’s cloud business was hit by an outage on Monday, causing widespread outages in service that supports websites and applications around the world.

Early Monday, Amazon Web Services reported an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” in Northern Virginia, a hub for its global data center business, but said in a later update that “the issue has been fully mitigated.”

Companies including US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, AI search engine Perplexity and London Stock Exchange Group data services have reported issues linked to AWS.

Snapchat, Lloyds Bank and BT were among the sites that suffered disruption on Monday, according to Downdetector.com. The website of HM Revenue & Customs, the UK tax authority, was also attacked. HMRC said it is working with AWS to bring its services back online.

In a later update on Monday, AWS said that “most requests [on its cloud computing services] It should work now,” she said, having taken steps to resolve the outage.

The company said the outage came after errors in the DynamoDB service, which provides database software for mobile applications and websites.

Amazon also said: “Most AWS operations are running normally now. Some requests may be restricted while we work to find the full solution.”

Following AWS’s efforts to mitigate the issue, Coinbase said it saw “early signs of recovery.” It was also possible to access the Lloyds banking app after previous issues.

AWS is the world leader in cloud computing services, ahead of Microsoft and Google. Its data and application centers support mobile applications and websites from major companies and digital services for various governments.

Some of Amazon’s businesses were affected, including its Ring video doorbell service, as well as Alexa, its digital voice assistant.

AWS is a big earnings driver for Amazon, with analysts expecting the division to generate more than $126 billion in revenue this fiscal year. Amazon has pledged to invest at least $100 billion in the business this year, the bulk of which will be spent on building data centers to train and deploy AI-enabled applications.

The disruption caused by the outage “shows us just how widespread services like AWS are in supporting the applications and services we use every day,” said Rafe Billing, director of threat intelligence at Sophos.

Billing added that there was no indication of a malicious attack, but advised users to be careful when opening any links claiming to be from AWS as cybercriminals may seek to exploit the situation.