London / New York — Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing giant, has confirmed it has identified and fixed the root cause of an outage that severely disrupted thousands of the world’s biggest websites, apps, and financial services. AWS has cautioned, however, that a full recovery of services will take more time.
The disruption affected global operations for much of Monday, leading to more than 6.5 million outage reports worldwide, according to the monitor Downdetector. While several major platforms, including Roblox, Fortnite, and Lloyds Banking Group, have confirmed they are back online, some US users are still reporting intermittent issues.
The sites and apps initially hit included popular platforms like Snapchat, Duolingo, and Zoom. In the United States, the outage caused particular trouble for financial services, with reports of issues affecting cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, the trading app Robinhood, and the peer-to-peer payment platform Venmo. Several media organisations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, were also temporarily impacted. Starbucks confirmed its mobile ordering and payment app experienced a “very limited interruption” earlier in the day.
Legal Fallout Expected
The widespread disruption may lead to legal challenges as businesses attempt to recoup losses.
Henna Elahi, a senior associate at Grosvenor Law in London, explained that any ability to recover money will depend on the contracts between AWS and its clients, as well as the severity of the outage.
For businesses like banking apps, which saw thousands of reports of issues, the inability for users to make payments could have caused their customers to breach contracts of their own. Elahi noted that this is likely to prompt “customer complaints and attempts to recover any loss caused by the outage from the business.”
AWS operates on such a vast scale that few alternatives exist, underscoring the enormous logistical challenge involved in providing the infrastructure for a huge portion of the modern internet.
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