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Massive AWS outage interrupts myriad of online services
A cyber outage caused widespread chaos this morning as Amazon Web Service was left down and out.
(FOX 2/AP) - Websites around the world are dealing with issues Monday morning as a result of an Amazon Web Services outage.
Just a few websites facing user reports of issues on DownDetector include Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and more. The Associated Press also reported that it is dealing with website problems.
Amazon Web Services is used by companies, universities, and more for remote computing services.
The backstory:
The first signs of trouble appeared at 3:11 a.m, according to AP, when Amazon Web Services reported on its Health Dashboard that it is "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region."
Amazon then reported "significant error rates."
Dig deeper:
About two hours after the outages, AWS said in an update that it applied "initial mitigations."
The company reported "seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests."
Despite this, many websites are still experiencing problems early Monday.
Pat Geraghty said he was shocked when he learned everything from the Lions to concert tickets might be impacted.
"I heard it yesterday and then I tried to get on something today and it didn’t work, so I just kind of shut it down," said Geraghty of Troy. "And then I was coming over here to the library, I heard the Lions game might be affected tonight.
"People might not be able to get in with tickets. Mumford and Sons in concert (at LCA) tonight, they might have ticket problems. It’s huge."
Carolyn Gac said she experienced issues of her own.
"The Ring doorbell was down, although the bigger, my concern was if people can get in there, it’s like is there a malware or something? So now it’s your Amazon account, that we have like 5 or 6 people on all these accounts. Is that all getting hacked?"
So many questions and concerns, so we went to cybersecurity expert David Derigiotis who says it's not a cyberattack.
But what happened? He said the cause of the outage was a misconfiguration or connectivity issue - basically, a bug in the system.
So using everyday apps like Venmo, Snapchat, Amazon and Ring were down.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, says they received - so far— 11.1 million reports across all services.
To protect yourselves moving forward, Derigiotis has some tips.
"Always have a plan in place in case communication go down," he said. "Are you relying just on your phone? Are you using other apps, can you communicate back and forth with loved ones?
"It is the same thing with payment options. Cash, using contactless payments, credit cards. You always want to have a variety."
The Source: Information from the Associated Press as well as interviews with Oakland County residents and cybersecurity expert David Derigiotis.
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