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A massive Amazon Web Services outage disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide Monday, including several used by Canadians. Amazon said the cause was traced to an internal fault and that engineers were working to restore service.
The outage began overnight in the company’s US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia, one of its largest data hubs. A malfunction in a subsystem that monitors network load balancers led to cascading service failures that spread through the day. Amazon said the incident was not a cyberattack and that recovery was improving by afternoon, though some systems remained unstable.
Millions of users and more than 1,000 businesses were affected, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports peaked at nearly 10 million worldwide, disrupting social media, financial and gaming platforms along with cloud-based education services.
In Canada, Wealthsimple and Coinbase confirmed temporary interruptions, while the Toronto Blue Jays said their Ticketmaster system went down. Amazon’s own shopping site and Alexa devices were also affected, along with Reddit, Snapchat, Venmo, Fortnite and Roblox. Some users in Britain and the United States reported continued problems with banking and transportation apps as recovery continued.
Technology analysts said the event highlighted the internet’s dependence on a few large cloud providers, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google controlling more than 60 per cent of the global market. The failure demonstrated how even a single regional issue can disrupt large parts of the global digital infrastructure.
Despite widespread disruption, markets appeared unfazed. Amazon’s share price rose slightly in early trading as analysts suggested the company’s scale and dominance in cloud computing would limit long-term damage once services are fully restored.
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