AWS problem takes out Snapchat, Amazon and Duolingo

Many of the world’s biggest apps and websites have suddenly stopped working because an AWS site in North Virginia is experiencing problems

Update 10.47am

Engineers have applied mitigations so access to sites should improve throughout the rest of the day. An updated statement says:

“ We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”

Update 10.18am

An updated statement says:

“We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests.”

58 services are now affected:

AWS Application Migration Service, AWS B2B Data Interchange, AWS Batch, AWS CloudTrail,AWS Config, AWS DataSync, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Deadline Cloud, AWS Elemental, AWS End User Messaging, AWS Global Accelerator, AWS Glue

AWS IAM Identity Center, AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS IoT Core, AWS Lambda, AWS NAT Gateway, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Organizations, AWS Parallel Computing Service, AWS Private Certificate Authority, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Security Token Service, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Support API, AWS Support Center

AWS Systems Manager, AWS Transfer Family, AWS VPCE PrivateLink, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon AppFlow, Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Connect, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon FSx, Amazon GameLift Servers, Amazon Interactive Video Service, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Amazon Location Service, Amazon MQ, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Polly, Amazon Q Business, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon VPC Lattice, Amazon WorkSpaces

At around 8am this morning the website Down Detector lit up like a Christmas tree as users of an array of popular websites and apps started experiencing problems.

Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Fortnite as well as anything owned by Amazon including Amazon Prime, Prime Music, Prime Video, Ring and Canva.

Other apps include those from banks such as Lloyds and Halifax and broadband companies such as BT, Vodafone and EE.