The sun is rising on a recovering internet after an Amazon Web Services outage Monday took big-name services offline, like Duolingo, Roblox and Coinbase.
The big picture: The widespread outage demonstrated just how much of the internet depends on Amazon's cloud platform.
The latest: In its most recent update, AWS said it was seeing "early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues" and that it would continue to investigate the root cause of the outage, which sent shockwaves through daily life Monday morning.
Driving the news: AWS said in a statement earlier Monday that the issue had been "fully mitigated" but that some "requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution."
- In a subsequent update, it said that it was "continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors." EC2, or AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud, provides the computing power many apps and websites use to run.
Threat level: Canva, Lloyds Bank, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Reddit and other gaming, banking, social media and consumer sites saw large spikes in reported outages Monday morning, according to tracker Downdetector.
- Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., said Monday around 5:30am ET that it had seen "early signs of recovery," with some users able to access services.
- Downdetector also showed reports of outages impacting Delta Air Lines and United Airlines on Monday. Air travel is already under the significant staffing strain of a government shutdown.
Friction point: Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at free expression advocacy group Article 19, said in a statement the disruptions represent more than just technical mishaps. Rather, she said, "they're democratic failures."
- She urged diversification in cloud computing, saying, "When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles."
Go deeper: AWS wants 99% of the AI market
