Massive AWS Outage Impacts Alexa, Instagram, FIFA and More

Numerous clients of Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a challenging night due to a significant outage. The impact of the cloud-based service provider’s downtime was widespread, affecting a considerable portion of the internet, including servers for Instagram, FIFA, McDonald’s app, TikTok, and others, which had to manage disruptions. Notably, even Amazon’s own services, such as Alexa and Amazon Music, were not spared.

According to the online outage monitor Downdetector, as many as 12,000 notifications were recorded at the peak of the disruption. According to reports, users could not access the platform. Likewise, many of its customers were affected by the outages, and these services also struggled to operate. This is one of the biggest outages on the platform since the infamous 2017 outage, which was much larger in scale.

AWS goes down, takes others with it

The outage started around 11:49 PDT on June 13 (12:19 IST, June 14) and lasted until around 15:37 PDT on June 13 (4:07 IST, June 14). According to reports, the cause of the problem was the degradation of several parameters in the US-East-1 region.

In its latest AWS Health Dashboard update, it stated: “Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, several AWS services experienced an increase in error rates and latencies in the US-EAST-1 region. Our engineering teams were immediately contacted and began an investigation. We quickly narrowed down the root cause to AWS Lambda Capacity Management subsystem problem that caused errors directly to customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use of other AWS services.”

It also acknowledged that AWS customers such as Instagram, the McDonald’s app, FIFA, TikTok and others may have experienced login issues as well as limited access to AWS support calls.