A massive outage at Amazon’s cloud computing service disrupted apps and websites around the world Monday, leaving customers and businesses feeling the effects.
Amazon Web Services said the outage, which started early in the morning, was resolved by Monday evening.
Here’s what we know about what happened.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services is Amazon’s cloud services unit, which provides digital services to companies, governments and individuals.
Shion Guha, professor of human-centred data science at the University of Toronto, says when most people think about Amazon, they think about its online store or Prime Video, but AWS is where the company makes a lot of its money.
Guha said businesses seek out AWS for its centralized network of servers and other distributed software products.
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Businesses can use AWS to host their website, for example, and can buy computing power on AWS so they can run analysis on large amounts of data.
Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, constituting over 41 per cent of the market, according to research group Gartner. Google and Microsoft are the next biggest competitors.
Who was affected?
The outage on Monday morning impacted popular social media apps like Snapchat and Reddit and disrupted businesses around the world.
Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, outage tracking website Downdetector said.
The outage also affected food delivery and rideshare apps, as well as messaging app Signal, streaming apps Netflix and Disney+, video chat app Zoom, and Amazon’s own services, among many others.
