A worldwide Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has brought dozens of cloud services to their knees.
Communications, banking and online apps like Roblox and Snapchat were all affected by the massive outage. Some sources estimate that as many as 500 services could have been disrupted this morning.
However, Amazon reports that it is starting to bring services back online.
“We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services,” the company said in an update.
“During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution.
“We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.
“We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Concerns that the outage could be the result of a cybersecurity breach are not unreasonable. “When anything like this happens the concern that it’s a cyber incident is understandable,” says Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos.
“AWS has a far reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset. In this case it looks like it is an IT issue on the database side and they will be working to remedy it as an absolutely priority.”