Massive Amazon outage takes down Snapchat, Alexa, Ring, Roblox and much of the internet – all the latest on the AWS blackout

Its latest post, from 2.27am PT / 5.27am ET / 10.27am BST, says: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information”.

My takeaway from that (and the evidence on Downdetector) is that we’re past the worst of the earthquake, but aftershocks and problems could still continue for a while yet…

Becky Scarrott, TechRadar’s audio editor, reports: “I’m TechRadar’s audio editor and the time of writing, Downdetector‘s list of Tidal outage reports has tipped 337 entries, with 63% listing app issues (which makes sense, because that’s how most people access music on the fly – ie. their commute), 15% noting the website isn’t letting them in (it isn’t for me) and 22% mentioning the server connection.

“I initially got the wheel of death on the app, then a crash. And when I tried to click back into the Tidal app, a ‘504 Gateway Time-out’ message appeared, after I was prompted to log in.

This is of course related to AWS’s “operational issues”, and let me tell you, my operational issues are also affected when I can’t get my Monday morning playlist going…”

The AWS outage has rippled far and wide across the internet, but some of the biggest hit have been Amazon’s own services like Alexa and Ring.

For many, Ring cameras have become intertwined with their daily schedule – and that’s now been massively disrupted today, as TechRadar’s Senior Writer AI told me.

“Every morning I go for a coffee before work, taking the dog a walk around the block before sitting at my desk for the day. Normally, my smartphone gets bombarded with Ring doorbell notifications from the busy neighbors moving in and out, as I pay close attention to the app waiting for the postman.

“Today, however, until I realized that AWS services were down I just sat confused as to why the normal morning ruckus of the school run wasn’t happening. I work with headphones on and rely on Ring to know when to open the door for the postie before my dog gets alerted by their presence.

“With Ring struggling this morning, I’m going to have to stay ultra aware as I wait for the knock on my door, fully accepting that my tiny French Bulldog is going to go crazy at the thought of an intruder.

“Millions of people rely on Ring for security and safety concerns, while others just need the video doorbell for simplifying life and knowing when mail has been delivered. My Ring doorbell is one of the best tech purchases I’ve ever made, and that’s only emphasized when it stops working and I can’t go about my day the way I usually would”, he said.

The latest from the AWS dashboard at 1.26am PDT / 9.26am BST is that “significant error rates” are happening in the ‘US-EAST-1 Region’ and that “engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause”. Let’s hope they do that sooner rather than later…

This Reddit thread shows many were recently reporting problems with the assistant, with some saying they “had to turn the lights off manually” and couldn’t set their alarms.

Well, AWS is the root cause – and Alexa is far from the only service experiencing problems. Alongside Ring, Snapchat and Zoom, we’re also seeing banking apps like Lloyds and Halifax in the UK and Robinhood in the US showing large spikes on Downdetector…

The problems show just how many services rely on Amazon’s cloud computing services. The AWS Health Dashboard is showing an “operational issue” in North Virginia that’s producing “increased error rates and latencies”. This is going to have serious repercussions today for millions…