On Monday morning, October 20th, numerous major applications and websites encountered significant issues. According to Independent, disruptions affected services like Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and Canva.
The problems began around 10 AM Kyiv time, which corresponds to midnight Pacific Time.
These outages are likely linked to a fault in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides infrastructure for a significant portion of the modern internet.
The company has already reported an «increase in error rates» and delays affecting «several AWS services».
AWS offers a wide range of internet infrastructure services that allow companies to rent computers and servers for their applications and websites.
Thus, any issues with AWS can rapidly impact a large part of the internet, leading to failures of websites that may not have any obvious connection to Amazon.
Currently, AWS is the leading provider of such «cloud» services globally.
Last year, the company generated $108 billion in revenue, and it now accounts for a substantial portion of Amazon's profits.
Amazon Web Services has stated that they are still investigating the cause of the issues.
«Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both resolving the issue and understanding its root cause», the company said in its latest update.