Early Monday (October 20) saw a massive outage at the world's largest cloud services provider, Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services), that is relied upon by some of the most popular websites including Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, Drink-X and many others.

The result was widespread disruption in major online services around the world, many of which are heavily used by large user bases. The UK Government's HMRC is used by thousands daily for corporate filings, whilst Reddit's forums sees over 110 million daily active users; popular sites such as Drink-X is beloved by fans for being the world's first and only universal drinks review site for everything from wines to whiskies, stouts to rums, with Duolingo the adored owl-fronting language learning app.

The disruption proves to be the largest of its kind since 2024's Crowdstrike outage saw airplanes around the world grounded to a halt, amongst others.

After just over 6 hours of outage, AWS was finally able to have its applications come back online, although the company has acknowledged that it will continue to monitor the situation and respond quickly.

"We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple service. We are investigating," AWS has stated in its latest status update.

It's been confirmed that as of 2 PM (1400) GMT, Reddit, Roblox and Drink-X have resumed operations as per normal, whilst sites such as Snapchat and Duolingo has remained intermittently unstable.

AWS has clarified that the source of the outage has been confirmed to have originated from its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, which currently sits as the company's oldest and also largest data provider for its web services division. The site has previously suffered similar outages in 2020 and 2021.

Kanpai!

88 Bamboo Editorial Team