Amazon Web Services Crashes On Christmas, Several Websites Down

Several reports claim that the Amazon Web Services servers have crashed on the intervening night of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As per Downdetector, a platform that reports online outages, over 3200 users reported crashes in several websites due to the AWS server crash. Platforms like Epic Games Store, Steam, Xbox, PlayStation Network and other gaming services have been severely impacted. 

The outage has majorly affected users in the USA, with some facing the impact in India as well. The issue peaked at 7 am IST on December 25, as per Downdetector. Cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi were impacted in India. This is the second time the AWS servers have crashed this year. 

Internet disruptions tied to Amazon’s cloud computing service affected people around the world in October this year. About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. But the company later said it was continuing to respond to “significant” errors and connectivity issues across multiple services. Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption because Amazon’s problem took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.

Many popular internet services and publishers were down after a brief outage in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies -- everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services -- were affected for more than five hours. Other major outages happened in 2020 and 2017.

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