Amazon Web Services outage takes down major websites including Reddit, Snapchat, and Venmo
It’s a good reminder of just how big AWS is — powering more than 76 million websites globally.
When Amazon’s cloud service sneezed this morning, huge chunks of the internet caught a bad cold.
First noted by Amazon Web Services at 12:11 a.m. PDT on Monday, the cloud service provider detected an “operational issue” in northern Virginia, a hub for its global data centers, affecting “multiple services” in its US-EAST-1 region.
What followed was a morning of app-based chaos around the world, as users reported that popular websites and services including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, United Airlines, and Paypal’s Venmo were suffering from the outage, according to Downdetector data. Most AWS services are now back to business as usual, as the “underlying DNS issue,” sometimes referred to as the internet’s phonebook, which directs recognizable website names to unique IP addresses, has been “fully mitigated.”
The long list of major websites that were affected by Monday’s outage reflects just how reliant our modern internet infrastructure is on a few giant tech companies.
Data from Built With shows that a whopping 76 million website are built with AWS infrastructure, including more than 20,000 websites that earn more than $1 million every month.
Dark cloud
Originally developed from the e-commerce giant’s desire to build its own technology stack, AWS rents out its infrastructure to customers that want to make their products and services accessible all over the world without having to drop millions to buy the capital-intensive hardware themselves. AWS is now a major profit driver for Amazon, contributing 53% of its operating income as of the latest quarter, thanks to its dominant market position ahead of competitors Microsoft and Google.
Interestingly, investors largely shrugged off the outages; the stock briefly dipped a little over 1%, but it’s since bounced back as of 8:30 a.m. ET.
