A massive failure of Amazon’s web service has put many hosted systems out of action. The Fortnite game cannot be accessed.
UK students waking up today were confused by their inability to login to the Fortnite game. After a few minutes many decided to try Roblox or Steam instead, only to find they had the same issue. On trying to get into Snapchat to find out what was going on they failed there as well. Sensing a netcopalypse event large numbers of students with nothing else to do decided to go into lectures.
Scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse films played out across the country as shuffling hordes of students slowly converged on colleges and universities across the country. Universities UK announced that there had been a significant rise in attendance at colleges across the country today.
A major disruption to Amazon’s hosted web services (AWS) had caused large numbers of sites and mobile apps around the world. A snapshot of systems that have failed give an insight into how many companies and organisations rely on Amazon’s systems.
Problems began around 3 am ET. By 5:22 am, AWS had applied “initial mitigations” that were starting to take effect. At 6:35 am, Amazon said that it had fully addressed the underlying technical issues but that “some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”
The problem was not due to a cyber attack. Amazon have demonstrated that they can cause much greater havoc themselves. An Amazon announcement said that it was due to an “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” The systems affected are hosted on the Amazon Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region. This is AWS’s oldest and largest cloud region, a popular nerve center for online services.
Further technical information is available from GeekWire.