Widespread internet outage reported as Amazon Web Services works on issue

Widespread internet outages continued to bedevil many users on Monday afternoon as Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it was taking steps to address an issue that had begun preventing access to some popular websites earlier in the morning.

The Amazon cloud computing company, which supports wide swaths of the publicly available internet, issued an update Monday just after 1:00 p.m. ET saying that the company continues to “apply mitigation steps.”

“We are in the process of validating a fix,” AWS added, referring to a specific problem set off by the connectivity issue announced shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time.

Outage reports for AWS continued to rise in the early afternoon, according to DownDetector, a site that tracks online problem reports from users.

An elevated number of outage reports on Friday afternoon indicated ongoing problems affecting a slew of popular online applications, including Venmo, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, Snapchat and Lyft, DownDetector showed. Outages were also reported for Amazon, as well as its Alexa assistant and Ring cameras.

The first message, posted at 3:11 a.m. ET, said the company was “investigating increased error rates” for its East Coast region, which it refers to as “the US-EAST-1 Region.” DownDetector showed at about the same time a spike in outages across the internet.

After a series of updates on technical matters, AWS at about 5:22 a.m. ET said it had applied “internal migrations” that were leading to “early signs of recovery” from some services using AWS.

A few moments later, the company said it was seeing “significant” signs of recovery.

“Most requests should now be succeeding,” an AWS update said. “We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”

Shares of Amazon ticked up 1.3% in midday trading, despite the outage.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.