Dozens of popular websites crashed on Friday, leaving millions of users possibly unable to access online services, after a connectivity failure at Amazon Web Services' Oregon data region.
Issues began around 6:40am ET, affecting services including Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit and the Hulu streaming platform, according to Downdetector, which tracks online outages.
AWS first acknowledged the problem at 4:40am PDT, or 7:40am ET, though the disruption may have started earlier. The company said the issue was resolved shortly after 9am ET.
Seven AWS services affected
The failure struck AWS's US-West-2 region in Oregon and ultimately affected seven services: AWS Direct Connect, Global Accelerator, Internet Connectivity, IoT Core, Amazon API Gateway, Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Container Service.
AWS provides the computing power and online infrastructure used by countless websites, apps and businesses, so a regional failure can disrupt many seemingly unrelated services at once. EC2 supplies the virtual servers that websites and apps run on, while API Gateway lets different online systems communicate with each other. Problems with Internet Connectivity and Direct Connect can stop businesses and users reaching services hosted in the affected region even when those services' own systems are still working.
An AWS spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Mail that the company had experienced connectivity problems affecting multiple services in its Oregon region, but said the issue was resolved shortly after 9am ET. AWS expanded the list of affected services from five to seven during the outage, adding Global Accelerator, which directs users along the fastest available routes to websites, and Elastic Container Service, which runs applications across Amazon's servers. The additions suggested the failure was hitting multiple layers of AWS's Oregon network rather than a single product.
AWS labeled the incident "impacted," confirming that customers were experiencing problems, though there was no indication that data had been lost or that Amazon's entire global network had failed.
Users and companies react online
Companies using AWS posted apologies on X while their websites were unavailable. One wrote: "There is a massive AWS outage in America which is causing interruptions."
Users shared their frustration during the disruption. One wrote: "AWS is down and is literally breaking the internet. Please hang on." Another posted: "This is not a drill, AWS in us-west-2 is offline for everyone."
PlayStation users were among those reporting problems, with one player saying they had been abruptly kicked out of a game on Friday morning. Another X user wrote: "Anyone else's PlayStation connection down just tried to start a stream and I can't play the game."
Downdetector breakdown
According to Downdetector, 30 percent of users reporting problems cited issues with Amazon EC2, the service that provides virtual servers for websites and applications. Another 29 percent reported problems with AWS's US-West-2 region in Oregon, and a further 23 percent cited issues involving US-East-1, the company's Northern Virginia region.
