Updates with AWS outage
Oct 20 (Reuters) - Amazon's AMZN.O cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday that affected major websites and apps globally, the first major internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction.
Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:
BRITISH AIRWAYS
IAG-owned ICAG.L British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future. According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.
ALPHABET GOOGL.O
Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India.
FASTLY FSLY.N
In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.
AKAMAI AKAM.O
Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.
META META.O
Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.
X Corp
Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online. Downdetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.
CROWDSTRIKE CRWD.O
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.
Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and canceled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.
AWS
Amazon's cloud services unit was hit by an outage on October 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Fortnite and Snapchat SNAP.N.
AWS said in a 0711 GMT update on its website that it was seeing increased "error rates and latencies" for multiple services. In a later update, it said the underlying issue was fully mitigated and most of its operations were working normally.
(Reporting by Philippe Leroy Beaulieu and Eva Orsolya Papp in Gdansk; Editing by Mark Potter and Milla Nissi-Prussak)
((Philippe.leroybeaulieu@tr.com;))