Amazon Web Services struggles to recover from massive outages

Popular websites went down early Monday morning and users around the world reported internet disruptions into the afternoon after the cloud service provider ran into a series of errors. The outage affected more than 90 services provided by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, that support businesses including Delta Airlines, Google, online broker Robinhood, and the digital payment service Venmo. After AWS said it had fully mitigated the issue that caused the mass outage, another wave of issues hit websites late Monday morning, according to the online disruption aggregator Downdetector. In its midday update, AWS said it had uncovered part of the cause for the outages and that its programs seemed to be recovering.

What is AWS? The cloud provider offers computer power, data storage, and hosting tools for websites around the world. Companies, media outlets, universities, and government agencies also utilize the service’s infrastructure. In June 2023, a disruption at AWS took down websites for about two hours, while an outage in 2021 also left websites offline for hours. 

Dig deeper: Read my report from last year about the CrowdStrike outage that left millions of air travelers stranded.