Why was the internet down today? AWS explains Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, Xbox outage
Major websites and mobile phone apps were hit by issues to start the working week 🚨🚨
- A major outage hit websites and apps today (October 20).
- The AWS issue caused mass disruption.
- But what was the reason for the issue?
Amazon has offered an explanation for why huge swaths of the internet were taken down just as Brits were starting their working week. Major apps and websites suffered issues this morning (October 20) across the globe.
Social media apps like Snapchat were beset by log-in issues, banking services were disrupted, and huge websites were also troubled. It included Amazon’s own platforms as well as favourites like Roblox, Xbox, and the PlayStation network.
The problems were due to issues with the Amazon Web Service (AWS), which provides cloud-computing and API for major websites and apps. As of 11am, it looks as if it has been resolved, but you might be wondering what caused the trouble in the first place.
Why was the internet down today?
Despite the issues hitting a wide variety of websites and apps this morning (October 20) it can all be traced back to a problem with AWS. It provides services to platforms such as Snapchat and other impacted ones.
In an update at 10.27am, British Time, Amazon said: “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.”
The problem was identified as being: “Significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well.”
While the services are starting to return, AWS added: “We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”
Follow all the latest updates in our main article on the outage. Let me know if you are still experiencing problems by email: [email protected].