AWS service outage…Coinbase, United Airlines and others affected

Cloud-based games such as Roblox and Fortnite also went down

Many sites are currently being restored

Cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a large-scale service outage on the 20th (local time), causing several well-known websites to go down.

In an update at 2:01 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) on the 20th (7:01 p.m. Korea time), AWS said outages occurred across multiple services.

According to the website DownDetector, problems were found on sites including Amazon, Disney+, the McDonald's app, The New York Times, Lyft, Reddit, cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo and Verizon.

Some United Airlines and Delta Air Lines customers reported on social media that they could not find their bookings online and could not check in or check luggage.

Social media users reported that cloud-based games including Roblox and Fortnite were also down. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was inaccessible at one point.

It also affected generation on the AI search tool Perplexity. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X that "the root cause is an AWS issue" and said they are working to resolve it.

Domestically, SKT, Hyundai Card and Woowa Brothers are known to use AWS.

By 3:03 a.m., some services had been restored. AWS said, "Global services and features have also been restored."

Last July, a software upgrade error at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike paralyzed Microsoft Windows systems. This caused thousands of flights to be suspended and affected hospitals and banks, resulting in millions of dollars worth of disruption.

Kim Jeong-a, guest reporter kja@hankyung.com