By What a way to start into the new week. Monday has just started and all of a sudden multiple sites and services are down or extremely slow.
Multiple services down / unable to connect
I personally noticed this on my Signal messenger, which all of a sudden was unable to connect.
The Signal status page however showed no issues. A check on DownDetector confirmed a spike in users reporting an issue.
At the same more and more sites and other services also reported issues. The list is not complete but contains multiple widely used services, such as:
- Atlassian Cloud
- DockerHub
- Duolingo
- Fortnite
- Slack
- Snapchat
- …
The cause: DynamoDB in AWS Cloud
The services above all have something in common: They use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. And this is currently suffering from an outage of a backend service called DynamoDB. The AWS Status Page shows:
We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:45 AM."
The problem with DynamoDB? This AWS service is also used internally by AWS, for running other services. Hence the impact is huge, with currently 60 services impacted.
"The Independent" is following up on the outage with a live coverage.
