Amazon confirmed that elevated errors were still affecting several services within its AWS cloud network amid reported worldwide outages on Monday (October 20).

Some applications were back online as of 12:00 p.m. ET, however, elevated errors continued to affect other services, with AWS down for more than 7,800 users at 11:46 a.m., according to the online service disruption tracker Downdetector.

"We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services," AWS reported in the latest update shared on its status page at 1:03 p.m. ET. "Lambda is experiencing function invocation errors because an internal subsystem was impacted by the network load balancer health checks. We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system. For EC2 launch instance failures, we are in the process of validating a fix and will deploy to the first AZ as soon as we have confidence we can do so safely. We will provide an update by 10:45 AM PDT."

The outages were initially reported at around 3:00 a.m. ET, which included more than 2,000 outage reports from Roblox users, more than 3,000 from Snapchat users and about 2,000 among Ring and Amazon.com users. Other popular platforms reported to have experienced outages include Slack, Zoom, Venmo, Coinbase, Hulu, Microsoft 365, WhatsApp and Fortnite.

The disruption is reported to be linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud network that hosts and powers numerous apps and websites, with Amazon confirming that "multiple AWS services" were experiencing "increased error rates" and delays on its 'Service health' webpage.

“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon wrote. “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”

The AWS disruption is believed to have stemmed from the company's northern Virginia data center before triggering worldwide outages.

Denise Plante