Amazon Cloud Service Outage Hits Major Websites

On Monday, Amazon’s cloud computing service suffered a significant outage, causing numerous high-profile online services to become unavailable, including major airlines, government sites, streaming platforms, and popular video games.

This outage, which began around 3 a.m., stemmed from a problem with Amazon’s core database, leading many large organizations and businesses to experience disruptions.

Airlines such as United and Delta faced delays as a result of the incident. Additionally, users attempting to access services like Medicare, T-Mobile, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and others were unable to log in.

“Most of the internet is still down,” a tweet from Romulus Industries stated. The AWS outage is reportedly one of the largest seen to date, prompting many users to share their frustrations online.

In an official statement, Amazon indicated, “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

Hours after the initial disruption, AWS communicated that the underlying issue had been “fully mitigated” and that most service operations were returning to normal.

However, they noted, “Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”

This incident marks the first significant internet outage since the CrowdStrike incident last year that impacted various sectors including transportation hubs and healthcare facilities.

Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple shared insights with the Associated Press, mentioning that users should prepare for a “slow and bumpy recovery process.” He compared the situation to the aftermath of a large power outage, where neighborhoods face intermittent issues as systems come back online.

“While a city’s power is coming back, you might see glitches,” he explained.