Journalism of Courage
Amazon said on Monday evening that a cloud computing unit at its data center in northern Virginia has largely resolved a massive outage that disrupted the internet usage worldwide and caused thousands of websites, including popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit, to face global outage, Reuters reported.
Amazon said that the underlying issue behind the major global outage was nearly resolved, however, some users were still finding it difficult to use the services due to lingering issues in digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday affected a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
The Amazon outage affected users not only in the United States, but workers from London to Tokyo went offline and halted others from carrying normal everyday tasks like changing airline tickets, paying hairdressers among others. It was reportedly the largest internet disruption since CrowdStrike malfunction last year led to outages in hospitals, banks and airports.
After the outage was reported early morning on Monday, Amazon said it was starting to recover the underlying issue three hours after users were affected due to AWS disruption. But the issue kept lingering until 6pm ET (local time) when Amazon announced on its health website, where it tracks the outages that “services returned to normal operations,” AP reported.
Amazon blamed the internet disruption in AWS on the domain name system that converts web addresses into IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. These web addresses allow websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices.
Amazon’s AWS provides cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world’s biggest organisations, including universities, businesses, government agencies among others. A Reuters report stated that in the past five years, it was the third time that AWS’ northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to the global internet outage affecting hundreds of thousands.
(with inputs from agencies)
