Summary
Here’s a wrap-up of of the day’s key events:
As of 1:03pm PT, service recovery across all AWS services continues to improve, AWS said. It added that Lambda invocation errors have also fully recovered.
The disruption did not stop Amazon from continue to promote its upcoming 23 October event on all-things AWS. The company sent an email to AWS customers several hours into the mass outage, reminding them to register for the event intended to solidify the company’s hold on the cloud market.
Amazon’s online shopping platform is also down, with numerous error messages being reported by customers. Featuring an Amazon dog, the error message says: “Sorry, something went wrong on our end.”
Experts have warned of the perils of relying on a small number of companies for operating the global internet after a glitch at Amazon’s cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world. The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.
The UK’s National Rail website is among the sites caught up in today’s internet problems. The AWS outage led to occasional performance issues with the site, and its app, this morning, with some users experiencing slow response times.
UK politicians are demanding answers over the disruption at Amazon Web Services today that has grounded many website and apps today. The House of Commons’ Treasury Committee has written to the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby, to ask why the government has not, yet, designated Amazon a “critical third party” to the UK’s financial services sector.
Amazon cannot process returns of its own parcels, according to at least one Post Office branch in London today, which refused attempts by customers to send back unwanted items this afternoon. Customers were told that the internet outage meant barcodes used to log returns could not be processed.
By bringing down popular web sites, apps and services across the world, the problem with Amazon’s DynamoDB database service has highlighted just how dependent global businesses and users are on the company’s web services. Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, has warned that the UK is “dangerously overexposed to foreign Big Tech monopolies.”
We’re now ending our live coverage of the outage but you can read latest updates in our full report here:
Updated
AWS has just released another update a few minutes ago in which they said that Lambda invocation errors have fully recovered and function errors continue to imrprove.
AWS added: “We have scaled up the rate of polling SQS queues via Lambda Event Source Mappings to pre-event levels.”
