Major AWS outage disrupts multiple global websites including Snapchat

CALIFORNIA: Amazon Web Services, a leading cloud infrastructure company, has suffered a major technical glitch, causing dozens of major websites to suddenly shut down.

In a statement, AWS said that an operational issue has emerged that is affecting multiple services, and the company is working on parallel paths to speed up the recovery process.

According to the company, more than 70 of its own services were affected by the glitch. The company later announced that it was seeing significant signs of recovery.

Amazon then reported that the problem has been fully resolved, and most services are now working as usual.

The statement added that some requests may be temporarily limited until a full recovery is achieved, as some services are still handling a high backlog of requests.

Snapchat and other websites affected

Customer complaints showed that the outage affected the websites of several major companies, including Amazon, Disney Plus, Lyft, the McDonald’s app, the New York Times, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo, and Verizon. In addition, British government websites were also affected.

A British government spokesperson told CNBC that we are aware that Amazon Web Services and many online services that rely on it are experiencing an issue.

We are in constant contact with the company under our established emergency contact strategy, which is working to restore services as soon as possible.

Lloyds Banking Group also confirmed that some of its services were affected and asked customers to be patient for a while, as we are trying to restore services as soon as possible. About 20 minutes later, the bank reported that services had started to come back online.

Meanwhile, United Airlines and Delta customers complained on social media that they were unable to find their bookings, check in, or drop off bags.

Users on social media also reported disruptions in cloud-based video games such as Roblox and Fortnite. Similarly, crypto exchange Coinbase said many users were unable to access the service.

Graphic design platform Canva said it had seen an unusual increase in error rates that affected the performance of the platform. The company said its primary cloud service provider was experiencing a major issue.