Amazon Web Services confirms global recovery after outage impacts UAE users

Hundreds of UAE users were hit by online disruptions at major platforms amid a global outage, caused by issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Services were disrupted for several popular websites, including Roblox, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Amazon.com. Almost three hours after the outage, AWS confirmed global services and features have recovered. The underlying DNS issue was "fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are succeeding normally."

Top executives at AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood had attributed the outages to AWS. Shortly after the disruption, AWS confirmed the outage, and said it was "investigating increased error rates, latencies for multiple services in the US-East-1 region."

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Nearly two hours after the disruption, AWS said it was observing "early signs of recovery for some impacted services," after it applied initial mitigations. However, requests may continue to fail as the cloud service works towards full resolution, it added.

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The Amazon subsidiary, which competes with Google's and Microsoft's cloud services, provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals.

The service said it "identified a potential root cause for error rates for the Dynamodb Apis in the US-East-1 region". It added that issue appeared to be related to the "DNS resolution of the Dynamodb API endpoint". This means that global services or feature that relay on US-East-1 endpoints may also experience issues, AWS added.

As apps and digital platforms across the world faced operational challenges, UAE residents felt its impact too. At 12.24pm, Downdetector noted UAE users in the low hundreds had reported issues with Snapchat, AWS, Roblox, e-commerce giant Amazon.com. Khaleej Times staff can confirm that some pages on Amazon.com were failing to load during early afternoon.

Over 300 UAE users reported problems at Snapchat. Users took to X to complain about the disruption, stating that "nothing is loading or sending". Some said they even deleted and re-downloaded the app, and re-started their phones, in an attempt to get it working again.

Meanwhile, Fortnite and Perplexity were also hit in the UAE, although on a smaller scale. Only 40 gamers reported issues with Fortnite, while 19 residents using the AI chatbot-powered research tool complained of problems at Perplexity.

Last major internet outage

In September, UAE's two telecom service providers were hit by disruptions due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.

Most of the reported problems were related to landline internet, TV streaming, and mobile internet, it said. The slowdown came at a time when residents were in the three-day weekend, leaving users frustrated and unable to enjoy online services.

(With inputs from Reuters)

Poojaraj Maniyeri

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pooja@khaleejtimes.com

Poojaraj Maniyeri is a Digital Journalist who loves turning everyday conversations into news stories. She is also a typical bookworm, and brings a novel with her everywhere she goes.