Major AWS Outage Disrupts Global Internet

Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, thinks the huge outage is likely due to an 'internal error' at Amazon, but said we can't rule out a cyberattack at this stage.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: 'While a cyberattack can't be ruled out until AWS releases its full post-incident report, there's no current evidence of hacking, data breaches or coordinated attacks.'

Professor James Davenport, an IT expert from the University of Bath, says it's 'worrying' that an outage in this region is impacting UK banking apps, including Lloyds and Halifax.

'UK banks should be confining their usage to the UK, or at least European regions, but it might be that they rely on some service that actually runs out of US-EAST-1,' he said.

'Obviously, this is causing an impact now, but it might mean that some customer data is being handled in the USor possibly that customer usage patterns, even if not actual banking data, can be inferred. We don't know.

'This would seem to indicate at least some unexpected dependency (easy enough to happen, but proper cloud auditing should have detected it if Lloyds itself is responsible – quite possibly a third-party dependency which Lloyds has not guarded against). In any case, worrying.'

Several frustrated users have taken to X to discuss the outage.

'Ring doorbell/cameras not working for 13hrs, I can't view history on the app & can't sign in on the website...' one user tweeted.

Another wrote: 'Is anyone else's Amazon Alexa down? Can't turn on any lights at home since they're all Alexa-controlled...'

And one joked: 'Me coming to Twitter to actually verify I'm not the only one experiencing the outage on Snapchat,' alongside a GIF.

Mr Moore said this error looks to have caused a 'cascading failure where one system's slowdown disrupted others' across the platform.

'It once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures with very limited backup plans for such outages,' he told the Daily Mail.

Dr Manny Niri, senior cyber security lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, thinks there has been a 'serious failure' at North Virginia (us-east-1).

'The wide disruption of major services, from Amazon's own platforms like Prime Video and Alexa to other services like Snapchat and Fortnite, appears, from what we know so far, to indicate a serious failure in the main AWS US-East-1 region,' he told the Daily Mail.

'This does not seem to be just a small software problem but may involve a failure in a key part of the internet's backbone, such as networking, storage, or compute services, which are essential for the operation of dependent applications.'

Dr Niri continued: 'For all affected businesses, this incident is a strong reminder that relying on only one cloud region is very risky.

'Companies should quickly assess their exposure, ensure they use multiple regions and failover systems, and maintain robust offline backups.

'While cloud computing is very useful, this outage highlights the need for better resilience, redundancy, and clear communication from providers to reduce the impact of such problems and maintain customer trust.'

Andy Aitken, co–founder and CEO of mobile virtual network operator Honest Mobile, said the incident is ‘clear reminder of how fragile the web can be’.

‘A single technical problem in one provider can ripple across a huge number of services,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘Thankfully, these issues usually recover quickly, but it shows just how much of the internet depends on a handful of cloud providers keeping everything online.'