A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on November 28, 2023, disrupted numerous major websites and applications, underscoring the critical role AWS plays in the online infrastructure used by many businesses. The outage began early Monday, leading to “increased error rates and delays” particularly affecting users of platforms like Duolingo, Roblox, Fortnite, Coinbase, and Robinhood. Amazon identified a software error in an update to its DynamoDB database service as the root cause, which triggered widespread service failures.
Despite efforts to resolve the issue, disruptions continued into the night. The incident highlighted the vulnerabilities companies face when reliant on a few large cloud providers like AWS, which holds about 30% of the global cloud market. While AWS offers significant cybersecurity and data management advantages, experts warn that such dependencies can become problematic when outages occur. Amazon has heavily invested in its data centers, particularly in Northern Virginia, home to a large number of these facilities.
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