AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

Summary

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.More than 2,000 companies worldwide have been affected, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 8.1m reports of problems from users including 1.9m reports in the US, 1m in the UK and 418,000 in Australia.In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected, as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, Ring users complained on social media that their doorbells were not working.In the UK alone, reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. Other affected platforms around the world included Wordle, Coinbase, Duolingo, Slack, Pokémon Go, Epic Games, PlayStation Network and Peloton.By 10.30am UK time, Amazon was reporting that the problem, which first emerged at about 8am, was being resolved as AWS was “seeing significant signs of recovery”.However, after reporting further positive progress by late morning in the UK, Amazon still appeared to be struggling to overcome the glitch this afternoon as it acknowledged it was still experiencing elevated errors.“We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services … We are investigating,” AWS said in an update around 7am Pacific time and 3pm UK time.To aid the recovery, AWS said it was putting in place limits on the number of requests that could be made on its platform.Experts said the outage underlined the dangers of the internet’s reliance on a small number of tech companies, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google playing a key role in the clou...