Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Philip Georgiadis and Rachel Rees in London
Amazon’s cloud business said most of its services had recovered on Monday after a serious outage disrupted apps and websites ranging from Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, to Perplexity, the artificial intelligence search engine, and the UK tax authority.
Hours after reporting an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services’ in its data centre hub in northern Virginia, Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest player in cloud computing services, said the problem had been “fully mitigated”.
“Most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” added the group, whose data centres and applications underpin mobile apps and websites from big companies as well as digital services for governments.
“Some requests may be throttled while we work towards full resolution.”
The outage highlighted how dependent the internet has become on a handful of Big Tech companies.
AWS said it was continuing to deal with errors affecting customers who rent server space to run cloud-based applications.
The outage followed a fault with its DynamoDB service, a database software that underpins customer’s apps and websites, AWS said, meaning web addresses could not fully load.
Other groups initially hit by Monday’s outage included Snapchat, Lloyds Bank and BT, according to Downdetector.com.
The London Stock Exchange Group’s data services also reported problems linked to the AWS fault, along with the website of HM Revenue & Customs, the British tax authority.
Some of Amazon’s own business, such as its Ring video-doorbell service, and Alexa, its digital voice assistant, were also affected.
Following AWS’s effort to mitigate the problem, Coinbase said it had seen “early signs of recovery”. The Lloyds banking app was also accessible after earlier problems.
AWS, which leads Microsoft and Google in cloud computing services, is a big profit driver for Amazon, with analysts forecasting the division will generate more than $126 billion in revenue this fiscal year.
The parent group has pledged to invest at least $100 billion in the business this year, the bulk of which will be spent on building data centres to train and deploy AI-enabled applications.
Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos, said the disruption unleashed by the outage “does show us how pervasive services like AWS are in supporting the apps and services that we use every day”.
Pilling added that there was no indication of a malicious attack, but advised users to be cautious when opening any links purporting to be from AWS as cyber criminals might seek to take advantage of the situation.
The outage prompted a group of British MPs to write to the UK Treasury, asking why it had not identified AWS as a “critical third party” under a regime to “manage potential disruption” to financial services.
Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee, questioned whether the British government was concerned that “key parts” of the country’s IT infrastructure was hosted abroad, noting the outage’s impact on UK banks and HMRC. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
