A major cloud services outage has impacted websites including Canva, Roblox, Snapchat, Amazon and others globally, including in Australia, affecting potentially millions of users.
The issue is related to Amazon Web Services – tech giant Amazon’s cloud services arm – and the AWS status checker shows that multiple services are “impacted” by operational issues.
An AWS outage has affected websites globally.Credit: Downdetector
The company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region”, it says, though the issues are affecting websites globally.
Cloud computing is part of the backbone that runs the internet. Everything from start-ups to large enterprises use AWS. Netflix streams video through it, Airbnb runs their platform on it and countless companies host websites and applications there.
Outage website DownDetector showed issues plaguing dozens of sites including Hinge, Fortnite and Nine, publisher of this masthead.
Amazon said its engineers were working urgently on remediation. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” the tech giant said in a statement at 6:51pm AEDT on Monday night.
“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
Amazon’s Alexa service is also reportedly down for many users globally.
Canva said it experienced “significantly increased error rates” impacting functionality on the site, and was “actively investigating the issue” to restore access as soon as possible. It first reported the incident at 6.14pm (AEDT), in which it said that Canva and its features were “currently unavailable for some users”.
