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Websites and services across the United States and around the world were struggling to recover Monday after a problem at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has left leading games, publishers, streaming platforms and other apps unusable to millions.
The cloud hosting service that underpins much of the web and everyday online tools, went offline because of a problem with one its core database products, the company said.
Problems have persisted through Monday morning, according to the company.
The outage has affected users of sites ranging from Snapchat to the McDonald’s app and Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras to gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. It underlines the fragility of companies — including financial services — that use cloud-based servers to host their data, and how suddenly businesses across the globe can be affected by an unplanned outage.
AWS first reported a problem at 3:11 a.m. ET and said it was dealing with an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services in its center in northern Virginia, at its U.S.-East-1 Region center.
The Downdetector website received 6.5 million reports that more than 1,000 sites and services across the world were offline.
Snapchat said that some users were “having issues,” with some posting on social media that their friends lists and daily streaks had disappeared.
United Airlines, T-Mobile and the McDonald’s app were also having issues. The British government was also affected, with its HM Revenue and Customs website not accessible to some users.
At 6:35 a.m. ET, the company said the database problem that caused the outage was “fully mitigated” but warned that there may still be delays.
But at 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” saying it was investigating.
The problem stemmed from an error with Amazon’s EC2 internal network, which impacted AWS services including DynamoDB, SQS and Amazon Connect, the company said.
The service has gone down before in 2023 and for more than five hours in 2021, when customers found that they couldn’t access airline reservations and payment apps.
This time social media posts reported problems with cloud-based games, social networks and Amazon’s own services like Prime Video and Kindle.
Messaging services such as Signal were also affected, prompting Article 19, a nongovernmental organization that promotes freedom of expression, to warn of the democratic consequences of such outages.
“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures. When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, Article 19’s head of digital.
Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said its services were unavailable because of the AWS outage.
The trading app Robinhood, the payments app Venmo and the language learning app DuoLingo also appeared to be experiencing issues on Monday.
Media organizations, including Disney and The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, were also apparently affected, according to Downdetector. The Associated Press said that it was also experiencing issues and that it had enabled its “AP Backup” system for people to access breaking news.
AWS customers were unable to report the problem because its automated support ticking system was also offline.
AWS stores customers’ data and offers a range of online activities and is a major player in the cloud computing, having recently invested in artificial intelligence products. It’s also highly lucrative, making $107 billion in the 2024 financial year, 17% of Amazon’s total revenue.
Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.
Ben Goggin is the deputy tech editor for NBC News.
Steve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.
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