Liv McMahon,technology reporterand
Lily Jamali,North America technology correspondent
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had resolved a massive outage that knocked some of the world’s largest websites offline for much of the day.
More than 1,000 apps and websites – including social media platforms like Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax – were impacted by problems that Amazon said were at the heart of the cloud computing giant’s operations in the US.
The platform outage monitor Downdetector said user reports of problems globally soared to more than 11 million during the outage on Monday.
Even after Amazon fixed the underlying problem, experts said the outage demonstrated the perils of having so many companies rely on a single, dominant provider.
“What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is,” said Prof Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey.
“So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers.
“Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”
The issues appear to have begun at around 07: 00 BST on Monday, as users began to report problems accessing a slew of platforms.
This included a wide range of different sites and services, from massive online games like Fortnite to the language-learning app Duolingo.
Early in the day, Downdetector told the BBC it had seen more than four million reports from users across 500 sites within just a few hours – more than double the amount it would see across an entire regular weekday.
These later peaked at more than 11 million, it said, as more services including Reddit and Lloyds Bank attempted to recover.
At around 23: 00 BST, Amazon said all AWS services had “returned to
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