AWS suffers major outage! Takes down Alexa, Instagram, FIFA, more along with it

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage today, June 14. The disruption also affected several other servers including those of Instagram, Alexa, FIFA, TikTok and others.

AWS suffers a major outage in the early hours of June 14. (REUTERS)

Last night proved to be a rough time for many of the clients of Amazon Web Services (AWS) after it suffered a major outage. The cloud-based service provider going down affected a large part of the internet as servers of Instagram, FIFA, McDonald's app, TikTok, and others also were affected and had to deal with disruptions. Unsurprisingly, even Amazon's own services including Alexa and Amazon Music became a victim.

As per the online outage monitor Downdetector, as many as 12,000 reports were recorded at the peak of the disruption. Reports suggested that users were not able to access the platform. Similarly, outages affected many of its clients as well as these services were also facing difficulties in functioning. This is one of the biggest outages faced by the platform ever since its infamous 2017 outage, which was much larger in scale. 

AWS goes down, takes others along with it

The disruption began around 11:49 AM PDT, June 13 (12:19 AM IST, June 14) and lasted till about 3:37 PM PDT, June 13 (4:07 AM IST, June 14). According to reports, the reason behind the issue was a degradation of multiple parameters in the US-East-1 region. 

In its most recent update on AWS Health Dashboard, it noted, “Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Our engineering teams were immediately engaged and began investigating. We quickly narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use of other AWS services”.

It also acknowledged that clients of AWS such as Instagram, McDonald's app, FIFA, TikTok, and others might have faced sign-in-related issues as well as limited access to AWS support calls.