Sawt Falasteen - Amazon's cloud services hit by hours-long global outage

The maintenance site for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it took some three hours for engineers to largely fix the problem, which they first noticed when "increased error rates" hit multiple services.

By 1035 GMT, the issue had been corrected "and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now", it said. Some services, though, continued to be disrupted.

During the outage, many other online services were affected, according to Downdetector, a website monitoring internet problems. They included Reddit, various video streaming platforms such as Hulu and Disney+, as well as messaging app Signal and Delta Air Lines.

In Europe, several major mobile phone operators, some UK banks, Whatsapp and Tinder were also affected.

AWS said the problem appeared to originate in a critical AWS infrastructure zone, the US-East-1 region, located in the northern part of the US state of Virginia.

The outage showed "how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted," said financial analyst Michael Hewson.

"On an economic level it's almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket."

N.Shalabi--SF-PST