The internet can be a very fragile place, as evident by a recent issue with Amazon Web Services that's caused loads of popular websites to completely break today. For the most part, the modern internet is pretty magical. It allows folks to connect with friends, shop for anything, watch movies, play online games, etc. When all of the pieces work together and function as intended, there's not much you can't do.
However, perfect the internet is not. Whether it be hackers or random service issues, it's not uncommon for things to go haywire. This has been perfectly evident in 2021 alone. Last month, a huge outage with Google Cloud caused Spotify, Discord, Nest, and a ton of other major sites/apps to go offline. There was also an issue with Facebook services in October, resulting in apps like WhatsApp and Instagram to be offline for multiple hours.
Now, it appears chaos has struck once more. Beginning around 10:45 AM ET / 7:45 AM PT on December 7, numerous websites were reported as having issues. This includes the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Disney+, Chime, and others. A quick look at Down Detector confirms the widespread outages, showing huge spikes of user-reported issues across a wide array of different websites.
What's Causing This Latest Outage
What's the reason behind this latest outage? An issue with Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services (also known as AWS) is the cloud computing platform that powers a lot of major websites, apps, and games. Not only is what Amazon relies on for its own online services, but it's also the backend for many non-Amazon things. Just like with the Google Cloud outage last month, an issue with AWS often results in frustration and headaches across a wide variety of websites.
Per the AWS Service Health Dashboard, Amazon says it's, "Experiencing elevated error rates for EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery." It's unclear when everything will be back to normal, but Amazon's clearly aware that things are broken and trying to get its ship back on course. Until then, don't be surprised if many of your favorite sites aren't working.
Source: Down Detector, AWS