If you’re struggling to connect to your work apps today, you aren’t alone – Amazon Web Services (AWS) is suffering a major outage.
After an issue in one of its US regions overnight, users in Europe have been unable to access services such as Zoom, Slack and Canva this morning – all of which run on AWS systems.
Follow our live updates below…
Welcome to our live coverage of this major AWS outage.
The issues seemed to start in the early hours of Monday morning, with AWS’ US-EAST-1 Region seeing problems, which have caused a knock-on effect across the globe.
We’ve since seen major outages for a number of consumer-focused services, along with work-focused tools – outage tracker site DownDetector is showing the following…
Slack is one of the hardest-hit services, with issues across the board.
We’re Slack users here at TechRadar Pro, and have seen issues sending messages, links and more – so you’re not alone.
According to AWS’s own status page, the issue seems to stem from Amazon DynamoDB, which is the company’s managed NoSQL database platform – an important building block for many customers and apps.
It’s not just Slack and Zoom – DownDetector is also showing issues for other workplace tools, with Asana, Atlassian, Xero and Jora all affected (although reports do seem to be falling now)
Over at Zoom, it seems several parts of the platform have been affected, with its status page reporting several issues.
Zoom Chat, file transfers, Zoom Clips and Zoom Contact Center are among the services showing “degraded performance”.
My Slack access has just totally collapsed, meaning I can’t contact my team or find out what they’re working on – will no-one think of the poor editors?
Outage reports are now falling from their peak at both Slack and Zoom, but it seems like issues still persist across the board.
A new update from AWS – “Oct 20 2:22 AM PDT We have applied initial mitigations and we are observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services. 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, or by 3:15 AM.”
And just like that – another update from AWS, and it’s good news for all of us wanting to get on with work.
“Oct 20 2:27 AM PDT 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.”
Slack and Zoom are both still reporting issues on their respective status pages, but both have promised an update within the next 30 minutes.
As you can see from the screenshot below, DownDetector is showing a rapid drop-off in reports…
Some expert insight from James Capell, our Editor on Web Hosting here at TechRadar Pro…
“The outage appears to be caused by a DNS resolution error for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. The DynamoDB database is used for many core AWS services including IAM which is used for permissions. The DNS error means that this database service cannot be accessed by the services that require it to function. Since most AWS services rely on this service somewhere in the chain we’re seeing a lot of problems.”
We’re not sure exactly what happened at Slack – but it’s suddenly just had another major spike in outage reports.
The status page is still showing widespread issues, so it may simply be more users logging on and seeing problems – or possibly something more?
AWS has updated the severity status of the issues to “degraded” on its status page – which again could mean a solution is imminent…
However it’s worth noting that the east coast of the US is about to wake up and log on – could this affect the recovery?
Good news – AWS now thinks it has solved this issue, and services should be returning to normal very soon.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” it says on its status page. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Outage reports for Slack, Zoom, Canva and Xero have all basically fallen to nothing, although the status pages for the first two are still showing some issues, so we’ll stay tuned for anything happening there…
