A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted major platforms including Snapchat, Amazon, and Coinbase. Get the full details on the cause and impact.
A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) early Monday caused widespread disruptions, taking down major platforms including Snapchat, Amazon.com, and Coinbase and highlighting the internet’s critical dependency on a single cloud provider.
According to Amazon’s service dashboard, the outage was linked to a failure in the AWS API, specifically affecting the us-east-1 region. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the essential communication channels that allow different software services to interact. When the core AWS API faced issues, it triggered a cascade of failures. Dependent services—including those managing authentication, database access, and computation—could not function properly, causing the widespread outages across platforms that rely on these AWS building blocks.
This wasn’t just a few apps going down; it was a real-time stress test of the internet’s backbone. It underscores the immense power and responsibility held by cloud providers like AWS and will likely prompt many companies to re-evaluate their multi-cloud or redundancy strategies to mitigate future risks.
