Outage at Amazon Web Services disrupts websites across the internet

A massive outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted major websites and apps on Monday, in a show of how one company's online infrastructure has become essential for many modern businesses to function.

Amazon said it was fixing the problem but some disruptions were still ongoing as of late Monday afternoon.

Tech experts tell NPR the incident highlights just how vulnerable companies are to these kinds of outages.

Here's what to know about what happened and why a single outage could be so damaging.

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The outage started early Monday

Amazon reported "increased error rates and latencies" starting around 3 a.m. Eastern that involved its facility in Northern Virginia.

Users reported trouble with popular websites and apps including Duolingo and the online games Roblox and Fortnite. Financial service companies like Coinbase, Robinhood and Venmo also reported disruptions, as did the companies that operate the chatbots Perplexity and ChatGPT. Amazon said its main website was affected. United Airlines, Canva, Reddit and Flickr also acknowledged problems with their websites. The Associated Press, NPR and The New York Times' games also said they had issues.

Amazon said late Monday that it was making "progress" to restoring full functionality.

How Amazon's cloud computing powers much of the internet

Amazon's cloud computing service, AWS, is like an invisible scaffolding that helps much of the internet function.

AWS lets companies store and manage data online using its database service DynamoDB, which was the service affected by the outage.

"In other words, they rent out their cloud computing resources to others so they can serve their own customers," says Chang Lou, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in cloud computing.

An early-morning software update to DynamoDB, however, contained an error, which took down the service in Northern Virginia. The error within that update then caused a chain reaction of service failures and disruptions.

Amazon says it has invested more than $50 billion in data centers in the state, which is home to the largest cluster of data centers in the U.S.

Amazon's importance in cloud computing is a mixed bag for customers

According to Synergy Research Group, AWS holds about 30% of the worldwide cloud computing market. Other big players are Microsoft and Google.

Betsy Cooper, a cybersecurity expert and the director of the Aspen Institute's Policy Academy, says there are pros and cons to companies using Amazon or another big provider for cloud computing. They offer strong cybersecurity protections and convenience.

"We all have an incentive to use the big companies because they're so ubiquitous, and it's easier for us to access all of our data in one place."

But, she says, there's a downside.

"That's great until something goes wrong, and then you really see just how dependent you are on a handful of those companies."

Editor's note: Amazon is a financial supporter of NPR and it pays to distribute some of NPR's content. Microsoft and Google are also NPR financial supporters.

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