A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has caused problems for thousands of websites, apps and online services from Reddit to the McDonald's app.

A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to widespread disruptions across thousands of websites and applications globally. Major platforms such as Facebook, Zoom, Snapchat, and Sony's PlayStation Network, as well as services like the McDonald's app and government departments, were affected. The outage resulted in nearly 10 million reports to DownDetector, with over 350,000 coming from Canadian users alone.

AWS, one of the three dominant cloud service providers alongside Microsoft and Google, plays a foundational role in the internet's infrastructure. The outage impacted both large and small businesses, with some unable to access critical services like payroll for several hours. Amazon reported that it had identified the issue and was working to restore services as quickly as possible.

Amazon Web Services outage disrupts websites, apps

Thousands of businesses and apps rely on Amazon's cloud services for data storage and other digital services. So when there's a problem there's a major ripple effect. Facebook, Zoom, Snapchat, Ring, Doorbells, Sony's PlayStation Network even the McDonald's app so you couldn't order a Big Mac. It began early Monday morning. So no matter where you were in the world if the company whose website or app that you were trying to access relied on Amazon Web Services it either wasn't available completely or it was experiencing outages. Within hours. We saw an avalanche of outage reports start to flood into DownDetector and this was not unique to one particular service. This was across thousands of different services. DownDetector which tracks outages says it received nearly 10 million reports. More than 350,000 were from users in Canada. It normally gets around 1 million over an entire day. The scale is very very unique and I suppose it points to the foundational role of AWS in the entire internet infrastructure. AWS has unmatched experience and... Amazon Web Services is one of three major players offering cloud services along with Microsoft and Google. If we're putting all of our eggs into so few baskets well when one of those baskets has a problem it's going to affect a lot of people. While the outage affected bigger sites like Wealthsimple and a UK government department it also affected smaller ones. I just couldn't access anything and I noticed I was getting a lot of error messages. And this small business owner couldn't access payroll accounts for three hours. As a small family-run business you know you've got so many balls in the air all the time and so when something like this happens it's difficult to juggle and balls get dropped. Amazon Web Services said early in the day it had identified the problem and was working to fully restore service as quickly as possible. Alison Northcott, CBC News, Montreal.

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