ISLAMABAD: Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, experienced a widespread outage on Monday that disrupted internet services for several global companies and popular applications, including Canva, Perplexity AI, Snapchat and Lyft.
According to Amazon’s service health dashboard, the issue began around midnight Pacific Daylight Time, when multiple AWS services in the US East region faced “increased error rates and latencies.” Engineers identified the cause as a Domain Name System (DNS) problem affecting the DynamoDB application programming interface and other interdependent systems.
The company said early mitigation measures were applied around 2 a.m. PDT, with “significant signs of recovery” by 2:30 a.m., though some users continued to experience delays as AWS worked through a backlog of requests.
Messaging platform Signal also reported being affected by the disruption. “Yes, we’re aware of the AWS outage impacting Signal,” company President Meredith Whittaker posted on X.
The outage briefly disrupted business operations and access to several cloud-based tools that rely heavily on AWS infrastructure. Reuters reported, Rideshare platform Lyft also reported its app was inaccessible to thousands of users in the United States.
AWS, which underpins a significant share of the global internet infrastructure, said its teams “were actively engaged” and would continue providing updates as recovery efforts progressed.
The incident underscores the dependence of digital platforms and global businesses on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, which hosts millions of websites and applications worldwide.
As of early Monday morning Pacific time, AWS said most services had recovered and were “succeeding normally,” though residual effects could persist for some customers.
.jpg)
.jpg)