Amazon Web Services outage shows internet users ‘at mercy’ of too few providers, experts warn

Experts have warned of the perils of relying on a small number of companies for operating the global internet after a glitch at Amazon’s cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world. The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company. More than 1,000 companies worldwide were affected, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 6.5m reports of problems from users including more than 1m reports in the US, 400,000 in the UK and 200,000 in Australia. In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, Ring users complained on social media that their doorbells were not working. In the UK alone, reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. Other affected platforms around the world included Wordle, Coinbase, Duolingo, Slack, Pokémon Go, Epic Games, PlayStation Network and Peloton. By 10.30am UK time, Amazon was reporting that the problem, which first emerged at about 8am, was being resolved as AWS was “seeing significant signs of recovery”. Referring to the US east coast region, at 11am it added: “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered.” Experts said the outage underlined the dangers of the internet’s reliance on a small number of tech companies, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google playing a key role in the cloud market. Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation ARTICLE 19, said the outage underlined the dangers of placing too much digital infrastructure in a small number of hands. “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies,” she said. Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, a thinktank that supports a sovereign technology framework for Europe, said: “The UK can’t keep leaving its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants. With Amazon Web Services down, we’ve seen the lights go out across the modern economy – from banking to communications.” Madeline Carr, professor of global politics and cybersecurity at University College London, said it was “hard to disagree” with warnings about the over-reliance of the global internet on a small number of companies. “The counter argument is that it’s these large hyper-scaling companies that have the financial resources to provide a secure, global and resilient service. But most people outside of those companies would argue that is a risky position for the world to be in.” Amazon reported that the problem originated in the east coast of the US at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides vital web infrastructure for a host of companies, which rent out space on Amazon servers. AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing platform. Shortly after midnight (PDT) in the US (8am BST), Amazon confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” for AWS services in a region on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect appeared to hit services around the world, with Downdetectorreporting problems with the same sites in multiple continents. Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a service that tracks internet outages, also reported a surge in problems on Monday morning, with many of them located in Virginia, the location of Amazon’s US-East-1 region where AWS said the problems began and where AWS has a number of datacentres. Rafe Pilling, the director of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said the outage appeared to be an IT issue rather than a cyber-attack. AWS’s online health dashboard referred to DynamoDB, its database system where AWS customers store their data. “When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” he said. “AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset. In this case it looks like it is an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to remedy it as an absolute priority.” The UK government has said it is in contact with Amazon over Monday’s internet outage. A spokesperson said: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”