Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network intelligence firm Kentik Inc, said the problems with the cloud computing network began mid-morning on the east coast.
Southwest and Delta airlines’ booking systems were affected, with Southwest switching to their west coast servers. Toyota also reported that over 20 of its apps were affected. The outage even extended to the Associated Press, leaving the news source’s publishing system diminished for most of the day.
Approximately five hours after the issues began popping up, a post on the AWS status page said the company “mitigated” the issue that caused the outage. The company did not specify what this issue was.
According to DownDetector, a platform that gives users real-time information on website outages, Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, McDonald’s app and Disney+ users all reported issues.
Madory said the outage was likely not caused by hacking.
“More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,” he said. “This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen.”
To technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud, the AWS outage highlights how much Big Tech has warped the internet, which was originally designed as a distributed and decentralized network intended to survive mass disasters such as nuclear attack.
Widespread and often lengthy outages resulting from single-point failures appear increasingly common. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including CNN, The New York Times and Britain’s government home page.
Then in October, Facebook—now known as Meta Platforms—blamed a “faulty configuration change” for an hours-long worldwide outage that took down Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to its titular platform.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
