Many of the world's biggest websites and apps are down due to an outage affecting Amazon Web Services

Dr Junade AIi, Software Engineer, Cyber expert and Fellow at the IET said:

“The large-scale outages of web services appears to have been caused by a major incident affecting one system in one Amazon Web Services data centre location. Amazon Web Services provide computing resources to other companies to use to develop their own projects, housed in various locations around the world. 

“So far, Amazon is reporting that the root cause appears to be an issue with one of the networking systems used to control a database product. As this issue can usually be resolved centrally, with multiple different options – unless there are further issues identified – the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours.

“Single points of failure are a growing concern when it comes to the resilience of technical systems. This issue highlights the challenges with depending on single cloud computing regions from single cloud computing vendors and highlights the need for resilience to be built-in to essential services which people are expected to rely upon.” 

Rimesh Patel, IET member and Independent Cyber Specialist said:

“This major online outage underscores a stark reality: Business operations associated with one critical vendor in a region can cascade into global instability.

"What began as a service interruption has rippled outward, potentially compromising key systems at the very start of the business week – an illustration of how supply chain and infrastructure resiliency must be front of mind for every organisation.

"Amazon has reportedly committed full resources to restoring affected services, but in the interim the burden falls to other organisations to mobilise rapid responses, isolate impacts, and limit service degradation wherever possible.” 

Dr Maurizio Pilu, a member of the Digital Policy Centre at the IET said:

“Amazon has just released a report indicating that the root of the issue seemed to be in a core database Application Programming Interface located in a specific data centre.

"This system plays a crucial role in resolving where exactly data and services on the Amazon cloud are located. While the technical failure is understood, I am sure that like in all case like these the underlying cause will be thoroughly investigated.

 “Typically, Amazon outages last 1 - 2 hours, and with the root cause identified, services should fully resume shortly. What makes this incident particularly significant is the widespread impact across services, regardless of whether they rely on American or EU infrastructure.

"The published list of affected sites is extensive. Events like this serve as a stark reminder of how concentrated and potentially vulnerable our global information infrastructure has become – something worth reflecting on.”

Nick Hunn, Chief Technology Officer at WiFore and Fellow at the IET said:

“As systems get ever more complex and interconnected, the opportunities for failure increase.  This may be another hack, but it’s just as likely that it’s a small change in one system which is rippling through with unexpected consequences.  The old metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas is equally true in complex software systems. A simple bug fix in one module may cause a major crash somewhere else in the system. 

“Today, many of our systems are so interconnected that nobody knows, or is even aware of these dependencies. As the commercial pressure is always to add new functionality, things tend to get strapped on to earlier systems, making them more vulnerable to instabilities.

“It’s a concern with the promotion of AI in coding. Building large systems needs someone to try and think through the underlying dependencies. The move to AI to speed up writing code (what’s called vibe coding) tends to ignore those, and just produces the specific new code, with little understanding of the consequences. It also requires a new generation of programmers to think about the broad effect of what they’re doing, rather than just concentrating on the immediate deliverable.

“This means headlines like this may eventually be downgraded to the level of everyday weather forecasts.  Systems will fall over.  What we need to do is put more training and awareness into upskilling programmers and companies that rely on complex systems.”

 
ENDS

Notes to Editor

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