Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing platform, experienced a major global outage. This disruption affected not only Amazon’s own services but also many popular platforms with millions of users, including Roblox, Fortnite, Udemy, and Zoom.
At the center of the outage are data centers on the US East Coast (us-east-1). Amazon announced at 03:11 ET (10:11 Turkey time) that “error rates and latency have increased for multiple services.” The company stated that engineers are investigating the source of the problem and working on a solution.
According to information on the AWS status page, many services, particularly DynamoDB, are marked as “disrupted.” This situation has caused thousands of websites using AWS infrastructure to become temporarily inaccessible.
The Cause of the Problem
AWS’s status dashboard reported issues in the US-EAST-1 region at 3:11 ET (10:11 Turkey time). According to Amazon’s statements, the main problem stems from high error rates in the DynamoDB service. This disruption in DynamoDB is affecting other AWS services in a chain reaction.
DynamoDB is a database service that runs on Amazon’s own cloud infrastructure. It can read and write data at incredible speeds. It can process billions of requests simultaneously without setting up servers or performing maintenance. However, as seen today, when that reflex breaks down, the entire internet can stumble all at once.
Currently, official statements from Amazon have not provided clear information about when services will return to normal. However, it’s reported that the outage is having global effects and connection issues continue in many regions.
Note: The site you’re reading this news on also uses AWS but hasn’t been affected by the issues so far.