00:01Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption on Monday because of a problem
00:06with Amazon's cloud computing service in the United States.
00:09The outage at Amazon Web Services affected dozens of major online operations, including
00:15social media apps Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, but also Airbnb and
00:20several banks in the United Kingdom.
00:22Some of Amazon's own services were also affected, like its Ring doorbell cameras and its streaming
00:27platform Prime Video.
00:29Amazon's reported failures throughout the day on Down Detector, a website that tracks
00:33online outages.
00:35About three hours after the disruption began on Monday morning, Amazon Web Services said
00:39it was starting to recover from the problem.
00:42AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments,
00:47universities and businesses.
00:48The company said Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to their domain name system.
00:53This mechanism converts web addresses into IP addresses so that websites and apps can
00:59load on devices connected to the Internet.
01:01Cybersecurity experts said the disruption highlighted the world's reliance on a handful of cloud
01:06services for its Internet usage.
01:09This is not the first time that issues with Amazon's key services have caused widespread disruptions.
01:13Many popular Internet operations were down after a brief breakdown in 2023, and AWS's longest
01:20outage in recent history occurred in late 2021 and lasted more than five hours.
01:25But Amazon's rivals are not immune to these types of challenges either.
01:28In July 2024, an outage affecting Microsoft Windows computers disrupted airports, hospitals and organizations
01:35around the world.
01:36About 8.5 million systems crashed and could not be restarted.
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