Amazon’s cloud unit recovering after hours-long major outage

Amazon cloud services unit AWS was recovering on Oct 20 from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps — Snapchat and Reddit — and disrupted businesses globally.

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The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since 2024’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.

After roughly three hours of disruptions, systems were gradually coming back online as at 6am US Eastern Time (6pm in Singapore), with AWS saying it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some impacted services.

“Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” it said in the latest update on the outage posted on its status page.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to firms, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages at websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.

Asked for comment on the outage, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.