Amazon's AWS Cloud Network Suffers Another Spike After Worldwide Outages

Amazon Web Services reportedly faced a brief spike in outages on Wednesday (October 29), nine days after its AWS cloud network faced worldwide outages.

The online service disruption tracker Downdetector reported user complaints surging just after 12:00 p.m. ET, most of which were concentrated in the US-EAST-1 region, which was the same area that experienced technical issues earlier this month, before claiming that operations had been stabilized in a statement updating the situation.

“AWS is operating normally and this reporting is incorrect,” the company said, noting that the AWS Health Dashboard showed no active incidents at the time of the update.

Outages were initially reported on October 20 at around 3:00 a.m. ET, which included more than 2,000 outage reports from Roblox users, more than 3,000 from Snapchat users and about 2,000 among Ring and Amazon.com users. Other popular platforms reported to have experienced outages include Slack, Zoom, Venmo, Coinbase, Hulu, Microsoft 365, WhatsApp and Fortnite.

The disruption is reported to be linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud network that hosts and powers numerous apps and websites, with Amazon confirming that "multiple AWS services" were experiencing "increased error rates" and delays on its 'Service health' webpage.

“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon wrote. “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”

The AWS disruption is believed to have stemmed from the company's northern Virginia data center before triggering worldwide outages.