Widespread AWS Outage Hits Financial and Consumer Sites

Core Viewpoint - Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest cloud provider globally, experienced a significant disruption affecting multiple companies and services, highlighting the critical role of AWS in the cloud market and the internet infrastructure [1][3]. Group 1: Disruption Details - The disruption was traced to a problem with a regional gateway on the US East Coast, with AWS actively working on recovery efforts [2]. - User complaints surged after 7:30 a.m. London time, with thousands of reports indicating widespread service issues [2]. - Affected companies included Coinbase, Robinhood, and Perplexity, with additional reports of disruptions from gaming sites like Roblox and Fortnite, as well as corporate messaging service Slack [4]. Group 2: Impact on Services - AWS accounts for approximately one-third of the cloud market, meaning outages can have extensive ripple effects across various sectors [3]. - Amazon's own services, including Alexa and the Ring home security system, also reported increased user complaints during the outage [4]. - The incident underscores the dependency of numerous platforms on AWS for their operational stability [1][3].