What happened to the internet? A cloud outage has disabled some platforms. The Polish Post Office has also been affected.
- Snapchat, Zoom, Fortnite, Duolingo, Slack and PlayStation Network - these are just some of the platforms to which users lost access on Monday before noon.
- Customers of Halifax, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland banks also reported problems.
- This is the result of an outage at cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services. The problem occurred in one of AWS's most important regions, US-EAST-1, located in Virginia.
- In Poland, the outage affected Poczta Polska, among others. Users of mBank also reported problems. WNP is awaiting confirmation whether the bank's problems are also a result of the outage.
"Perplexity is down. The problem is caused by an AWS outage. We are working on a solution," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on the X platform. Many internet services, including instant messaging apps, streaming platforms, and banking websites, experienced similar problems on Monday morning.
"We can confirm an increase in error rates and latency across multiple AWS Services (...)," Amazon said on its website.
Why did internet services stop working? We explain.According to the BBC, the problem stems from "significant query processing errors" in one of AWS's most important regions, US-EAST-1, located in Virginia. This region houses key infrastructure that powers a large portion of the internet.
The error affected one of Amazon's most important services – DynamoDB, a database that stores information needed to run hundreds of thousands of applications: user logins, payments, messages, and product lists in online stores.
When DynamoDB stopped responding, many other systems that use it also stopped working or started working with significant delays.
AWS provides services such as computing power and data collection to private companies, governments, and individuals.
The list of services affected by the outage includes Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Canva, Wordle, Signal, Coinbase, Duolingo, Slack, Smartsheet, Epic Games and Rocket League.
In Poland, problems with accessing services at some entities have also been reported. The Polish Post press office confirmed temporary system access issues at some facilities to WNP. These were reportedly "individual reports."
According to data from Downdetector.com, which monitors the availability of online services based on user reports, mBank may also have experienced problems. We are awaiting confirmation of this information from the institution.
UK government services affected by outageAccording to Downdetector.com, the outage also affected UK government services accessible through the gov.uk website. This includes services such as access to the HMRC.
A UK government spokesperson confirmed to SkyNews that such issues had occurred. "As part of our established incident response procedures, we are in contact with the company, which is working to restore services as quickly as possible," he noted.
In Poland, there have been no widespread problems with accessing government electronic services . Most use other cloud providers—primarily Microsoft.
"Too many eggs in one internet basket""This is a moment to remember how dependent we have made the internet on a handful of hyperscalers," security researcher John Scott-Railton of CitizenLab noted on Platform X. He wrote on Platform X: "Wake up call. There are too many eggs in one internet basket."
He also cited a Synergy Research Group report from August 2024 , which showed how centralization of cloud services is progressing.
In 2018, nearly 60% of global infrastructure was still located in traditional, on-premises corporate data centers. Six years later, data centers owned by giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta accounted for 41% of the world's total data center capacity.
And this trend doesn't end there – Synergy estimates that by 2029, major vendors will control over 60% of the world's digital infrastructure capacity, while the share of companies maintaining their own data centers will drop to just 20%.
wnp.pl
