A massive outage from Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused much of the internet, including sites like Snapchat and Reddit to shut down overnight.
The disruption was the largest since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction took down technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and has highlighted the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.
Following the internet meltdown, AWS was struggling to recover. After nine hours of disruptions, some of the applications were gradually coming back.
However, some applications like Lambda, one of AWS’s computing services, were experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem.
AWS said the issue originated within he “EC2 internal network”, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS and is used by businesses to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required.
While some apps like Reddit and Roblox were largely stabilised, outage tracking website Downdetector and others, including Snapchat, PayPal’s Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues.
