Major outage disrupts dozens of websites and apps worldwide
James Thorpe
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Multiple websites and apps have been disrupted following a major outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to the BBC, Amazon’s cloud computing division supports millions of large companies’ websites and platforms.
In a statement shared by the BBC, Amazon Web Services confirmed: “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
A number of major banks, financial service providers, online gaming sites and social media platforms – such as Snapchat – have been affected.
AWS has reportedly fixed the underlying issue which led to the outage – however, many platforms still appear to be experiencing issues.
“Resilience still depends on people and process”
“A local fault can ripple worldwide in minutes,” explained Charlotte Wilson, Head of Enterprise, CheckPoint (as reported by Sky News).
“We’ve built convenience on shared systems, but resilience still depends on people and process.
“Stay alert for scams or phishing attempts – especially when banking sites are down – and never click links or share details you don’t recognise,” added Wilson.
“Resiliency is not purely a technical parameter”
Tim Wright, Tech Partner, Fladgate added: “Today’s widespread AWS outage underscores the growing systemic risk from heavy national and sectoral reliance on a small number of hyperscale cloud providers.
“The disruption, which apparently originated in AWS’s US‑East‑1 region, cascaded across global networks – affecting UK institutions from HMRC to major banks such as Barclays and Lloyds, along with financial, retail and AI‑driven platforms that depend on AWS-hosted services.
“Today’s incident highlights the tension between cloud convenience and concentration risk.
“For regulated entities, especially in financial services, the UK’s Critical Third Parties (CTP) regime – now in force under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2024 and applied through the PRA and FCA’s operational resilience framework – will inevitably come into sharper focus.
“Supervisors may require stress testing and post‑incident audits to ensure that firms maintain visibility and contractual leverage over their cloud dependencies.
“As AI adoption deepens, and vast model training and data‑governance systems increasingly run on a handful of platforms like AWS, today’s event is a reminder that resiliency is not purely a technical parameter but a regulatory and contractual one,” continued Wright.
“Firms must reassess their agreements with specific focus on cloud exit, redundancy and incident‑notification contractual clauses through that lens.”
This is an ongoing story…
