Major retailers affected by Amazon Web Services outage
Amazon Web Services saw many of its hosted cloud services go down Monday, Oct. 20, affecting a number of big-name retailers and other companies.
The hosted cloud services division of Amazon first announced it was investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 Region” (the site of Amazon’s Northern Virginia second headquarters) at 12:11 a.m. PT on Monday, Oct. 20 in a post on its official health dashboard.
At 2:01 a.m. PT, Amazon reported it had found a denial of service (DNS) issue with the DynamoDB database supporting many of its services in the US-East-1 Region.
The company then said it had "fully mitigated" the underlying DNS issue at 3:35 a.m. PT, and at 7:29 a.m. PT announced it was "seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and...continuing to investigate the root cause."
According to CNBC, the outage affected the Internet capabilities of retailers including Amazon, McDonald’s, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Service interruption at Amazon reportedly affected areas of the company including warehouse operations, delivery services, and its Seller Central hub for third-party marketplace sellers.
Other entities reportedly affected include United Airlines, Venmo, Lloyds Banking Group, some U.K. government websites, the Reddit social media network, and the Roblox and Fortnite immersive gaming platforms.
“We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure,” Amazon said in an official statement to CNBC. “Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Read more CNBC coverage here.
Amazon experienced a similar temporary Amazon Web Services outage in the Eastern U.S. region in December 2021. In addition, a July 2024 glitch in a security update wreaked unprecedented havoc on Microsoft systems around the world. A defect found in the update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which was unintentional and not a cyberattack, caused issues including bugcheck/blue screen errors (colloquially known as the “blue screen of death”) which prevented users of some Windows hosts from starting up their systems.
[READ MORE: Microsoft outage causes historic global impact]
The error resulted in what may be the largest systems outage ever, impacting numerous industries around the world, including airlines, banks, hospitals, TV broadcasters, and U.S. 911 emergency services.
