Snapchat, Zoom, Canvas affected as AWS experiences downtime

An internet outage recorded by Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday prevented access to several major apps and websites.

Downdetector, an outage tracking site, told BBC that it has recorded more than four million reports of issues globally earlier today from users, which is more than double the 1.8 million reports the tracker records on a full weekday normally.

“At 06:56 UTC (02:56 AM EDT) users started reporting issues with AWS, in particular with the US East 1 region,” Downdetector said.

“As of 09:50 AM BST (08:50 UTC), over 500 companies, across all of our 66 sites, are reporting issues.”

AWS downtime affected platforms depending on its cloud service, such as Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Clash Royale, My Fitness Pal, Life360, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Canvas, Wordle, Signal, and Coinbase.

Addressing the situation, BBC reported AWS said it “appears to be related to DNS resolution” related to the way firms access its web servers.

Domain Name System (DNS) is likened to a phone book for the internet, which translates the website names people use into IP address numeric equivalents that can be read and understood by computers.

Disruptions to DNS makes it impossible for web users to locate whatever they are searching for.

The publication said the outage stemmed from Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia, on the East Coast of the United States, which is the company’s largest location for its web services, and data centres.

It is known to many as a critical centre for the global internet and is the default region for many users.

According to the report, AWS is working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery and it is observing “recovery across most of the affected AWS Services”.