A significant failure among Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon cloud computing division, caused massive disruptions on Monday, shutting down a huge range of popular applications, online services, and even large banks.
The attack started around 9 a.m. CET was a domino effect that revealed the strong dependence of the global economy on centralized cloud infrastructure.
AWS stated, “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
The impact of this failure of a single point was felt throughout the world as users could not access the services.
The scale of disruption was immense. Major platforms like Snapchat, Slack and Tinder flattered, while gaming giants like Roblox, Fortnite and PlayStation went offline.
This was also felt in critical services particularly by the tax collection agency of the UK, the HMRC authority and even the leading banks such as the Lloyds and Halifax banks.
Even the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was not spared despite the fact that it took to reassure users that their funds are secure.
After hours of silence, AWS issued a statement confirming, “We have identified a potential root cause... and are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
Engineers were immediately engaged, but the incident serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of the digital ecosystem when a core provider fails.
“We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” AWS added.