Amazon Web Services outages had knocked many global websites and apps offline, including Signal, Coinbase and Robinhood.
Amazon says that it has mostly fixed an underlying issue behind a major outage that led to widespread connectivity issues for businesses, popular websites, and apps around the world that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud service.
The company said on Monday that a cloud computing unit at a data centre in northern Virginia had largely contained the impact of the massive internet outage that affected popular apps such as Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, and Wordle, along with government agencies and global businesses.
In an update on its status page, AWS said it had successfully “restored EC2 instance launch throttles to pre-event levels and EC2 launch failures have recovered across all Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions”.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms, causing havoc on the web and for the many companies that rely on its infrastructure to function.
The website of the outage tracker Downdetector stated earlier in the day that it had received more than 11 million reports of connectivity issues around the world since the beginning of the outage, with hundreds of businesses impacted. Some websites and apps, including Snapchat and several Amazon services, experienced renewed issues after appearing to initially recover.
Amazon said that the problem appears to have originated from within the EC2 internal network. The outage does not appear to have been caused by a cyberattack.
EC2 refers to Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told the news outlet CNN that the financial toll of the outage has yet to be assessed, but is likely to be extremely high.
“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said.
