Amazon cloud computing outage disrupts Snapchat, Robinhood and many other online services
San Francisco (AP): Amazon said its cloud computing service was recovering from a major outage that disrupted online activity around the world on Monday.
Amazon Web Services provides remote computing services to many governments, universities, and companies, including The Associated Press.
On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app, and many other services. Coinbase and Signal both said on X that they were experiencing issues related to the AWS outage.
The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 am Eastern Time, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
Later, the company reported that there were “significant error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.
Around 6 am Eastern Time, the company said that it was seeing recovery across most of the affected services. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” it said, adding that it is working on a “full resolution.”
AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
"The world now runs on the cloud," and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.
And because so much of the online world's plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, "it's very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don't see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox," Burgess said.
Amazon Web Services said at about 6:30 am Eastern time that "most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now."
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No nation can progress unless small traders are protected: Arvind Kejriwal
Chandigarh (PTI): No nation can progress unless small shopkeepers and traders are protected and given ease of doing business, Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal said on Thursday.
Kejriwal made the remarks while addressing the maiden meeting of the Punjab State Traders Commission in Mohali, where he was accompanied by Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
The former Delhi chief minister said that through the commission, local markets will be upgraded, and long-pending small issues of shopkeepers will be resolved.
He said the purpose of the commission is to make the tax system simpler, more transparent, and trader-friendly.
"Till now, in our country, traders and businessmen have been viewed with a very negative mindset. No matter which government or which party ruled, everyone treated traders as thieves," Kejriwal said.
"I pray that one day our government is formed at the Centre and we free you from GST. There is a kind of tax terrorism going on," he said.
Kejriwal termed the traders also a victim of politicians, who, he said, only remember them during elections and then, once in power, to extort money till the next election.
"I come from a trading family. I understand the pain and suffering of a trader. You may remember how, as children, we used to go to the village during summer holidays. My uncle there had a grocery shop at the bus stand. During summer vacations, many times I would manage the entire shop alone for days. I understand the pain of a shopkeeper," he said.
The AAP leader said the governments always talk about big investments everywhere. "But no one ever paid attention to the small shopkeeper running a grocery store, a clothing shop, a bread shop, a tile shop, or shops in small markets."
Attacking the rival parties in Punjab, he said that after their run was over, neither the Akali Dal nor the Congress would have dared to go among the public and seek honest feedback.
"After four years, they would face such abuse that I do not think the Congress government would have had the courage to pass around a microphone in a public gathering and say, speak whatever you want … If it had happened during the Akali Dal government, the microphone would not have returned," he said.
