Massive AWS outage took down the internet for several hours impacting Reddit, Fortnite, and more

What you need to know

• Amazon Web Services outage disrupted major platforms and services worldwide.
• Outage peaked around 3 AM ET impacting over 13,000 users according to Downdetector.
• Incident highlights reliance on major cloud providers, prompting calls for diverse multi-cloud strategies.

People woke up to another widespread internet outage early Monday morning (Oct. 20), and this time it was Amazon's Web Services that was causing it. The company's cloud platform that a major chunk of the internet including apps like Reddit, Fortnite, Snapchat, Canva, Apple TV, and more rely on saw disruptions to it servics. Some reports even claim that government services around the world and many companys were impacted by this outage.

According to several sources, people started seeing issues with the services in the wee hours of the morning around 12am ET, while it the outage seems to have hit its peak at 3 am ET. According to Downdetector, between 4am ET to 12pm ET, over 13,000 people in have been impacted by this outage. Reuters says that it was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike outage that brought, banks and airports, to a halt.

The AWS outage primarily centered in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, which is the company's largest and most critical data center hub. AWS explained that the problem stemmed from a flaw in an internal system that monitors the health of network load balancers within their EC2 network. This issue caused "increased error rates and latencies" and API errors across various AWS services.

Looks like most of the affected apps are slowly getting back online after almost six hours of constant disruptions. AWS still says the connection severity is "degraded" on their service health site. The company stated that " We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services."

"For EC2 launch instance failures, we are in the process of validating a fix and will deploy to the first AZ as soon as we have confidence we can do so safely. We will provide an update by 10:45 AM PDT."

This outage has sparked a lot of conversations about how much almost the entire internet relies on just one company for so many of its basic functions. It also shows us how a single error in one major cloud provider can cause widespread, immediate problems and a need for more companes to use stronger multi-region or multi-cloud strategies for essential operations.

Much like X's CEO Elon Musk who a shot at AWS to say that "Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange AWS dependencies," he stated.