A major global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has left millions of users offline and disrupted operations for major companies worldwide, including in Australia.
The issue, which began around 6pm AEDT on Monday, affected multiple AWS services and hit platforms including Canva, Roblox, Snapchat and Amazon itself, effectively bringing parts of the internet to a standstill.
More than 6.5 million reports were logged on outage tracker Downdetector from over 1,000 affected companies globally. The issues, which began to ease from around 9pm, appear to have originated from AWS, the cloud platform that powers many of the world’s leading websites and apps.
Impact on travel
According to Skift, AWS counts some of the biggest names in travel among its partners, spanning airlines, hotels, OTAs and car rental companies. Its airline clients include Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Air Canada and Ryanair. On the hotel side, AWS works with Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation and Best Western Hotels & Resorts. Its OTA partners include Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, while in the car rental sector it supports Avis, Hertz and Budget Rent a Car.
United Airlines was amongst those confirmed as being impacted by the outage.
Several of Australia’s largest travel companies – including Flight Centre Travel Group, Nib Group and Webjet Limited – also use AWS.
In response to Travel Weekly, nib confirmed it had not been impacted by the outage: “The AWS issue has not affected nib Group’s operations, due to our design principles, built for resiliency. This means we had zero operational impact for nib Group (which includes Travel).”
Flight Centre Travel Group and Webjet Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Amazon response
“On October 20 at 12:11am PDT, we identified increased error rates across multiple services and determined the issue was related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in our N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region,” an AWS spokesperson said. “The underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24am PDT, though some customers continue to experience increased error rates due to issues with launching new EC2 instances. This incident has also impacted Amazon.com, Amazon subsidiaries and AWS customer support operations. We’re working to fully restore service as quickly as possible and are providing ongoing updates via the AWS Health Dashboard.”
