Worldwide Disruption Paralyzes Amazon Services

"We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region," said the cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a status update on its website on Monday. After about a three-hour disruption, AWS reported on Monday that the situation was stabilizing. Most requests are now successful, and they are working to process the remaining requests. No further details were provided, and the parent company Amazon was not available for comments.

Amazon Disruption: Centralization as a Risk Factor

According to cybersecurity expert Junade Ali, the problem lies with one of the network systems that AWS uses to manage a database product. Since this can usually be resolved centrally, longer outages are not expected. Ali is a member of the research network Institution of Engineering and Technology.

However, the outage highlights the dependency of the economy and society on a few cloud providers, other experts warned. A single technical error can disrupt the business of numerous companies and the daily lives of millions of users. Additionally, many of the affected companies rely on a single cloud provider, emphasized Nishanth Sastry, Chief Researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey.

Amazon Web Services is the World's Largest Cloud Provider

AWS offers computing power, online storage, and other digital services to businesses, governments, and individuals. The company, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, is among the so-called hyperscalers, the world's leading cloud providers. Although there are currently no indications of a hacker attack on AWS, said Rafe Pilling, manager at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. The emergence of such speculations is understandable given the scale of the current outage.

According to Ookla, the operator of the websites Allestörungen.de and Downdetector.com, several million users worldwide reported problems with various online services on Monday morning. Affected were, among others, the popular platforms Snapchat and Reddit, as well as the video games "Fortnite" and "Clash of Clans". In some regions, the apps of ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft were not functioning. The AI search engine Perplexity.ai, the online broker Robinhood, and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase attributed the disruptions of their respective services to the AWS glitch. Lloyds Bank and the mobile operator Vodafone also struggled with outages.

(APA/Red)

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