Refresh
Outage reports for Slack, Zoom, Canva and Xero have largely dropped to nothing, although the status pages for the first two are still showing some issues, so we’ll keep an eye on what happens there…
Good news – AWS now believes it has resolved this issue and services should return to normal soon.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS services,” the status page says. “We can confirm that global services and features dependent on US-EAST-1 have also been restored. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
AWS has updated the severity of the issues to “degraded” on its status page – which in turn could mean a fix is imminent…
It’s worth noting, though, that the US East Coast is waking up and logging on – could that affect the recovery?
We’re not sure exactly what happened at Slack – but it’s suddenly just had another big spike in outage reports.
The status page still shows widespread issues, so it could simply be more users logging in and seeing issues – or possibly something more?
Some expert insights from James Capell, our web hosting editor here at TechRadar Pro…
“The outage appears to be caused by a DNS resolution error for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. The DynamoDB database is used by many core AWS services, including IAM, which is used for permissions. The DNS error means that this database service cannot be accessed by the services that require it to function. Since most AWS services depend on this service somewhere in the chain, we see many problems.”
Slack and Zoom are both still reporting issues on their respective status pages, but both have promised an update within the next 30 minutes.
As you can see from the screenshot below, DownDetector is showing a rapid drop in reports…
And just like that – another update from AWS, and it’s good news for all of us who want to get down to business.
“Oct 20 02:27 PDT We see significant signs of improvement. Most requests should now succeed. We continue to work through a backlog of queuing requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”
A new update from AWS – “Oct 20 02:22 PDT We have applied initial remediation and are observing early signs of recovery for some affected AWS services. During this period, requests may continue to fail as we work towards full resolution. We advise customers to retry failed requests.”
“While requests are beginning to succeed, there may be additional wait times and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 3:15 a.m. at the latest.”
Reports of outages are now falling from their peak on both Slack and Zoom, but it appears there are still issues across the board.
My Slack access has just completely collapsed, meaning I can’t contact my team or find out what they’re working on – won’t anyone think of the poor editors?
At Zoom, it appears that several parts of the platform have been affected, and its status page reports several issues.
Zoom Chat, file transfers, Zoom Clips and Zoom Contact Center are among the services showing “degraded performance.”
It’s not just Slack and Zoom – DownDetector is also showing issues for other workplace tools, with Asana, Atlassian, Xero and Jora all affected (although reports seem to be dropping now)
According to AWS’s own status page, the issue appears to originate with Amazon DynamoDB, the company’s managed NoSQL database platform – a key building block for many customers and apps.
Slack is one of the hardest hit services with problems across the board.
We’re Slack users here at TechRadar Pro and have seen issues sending messages, links and more – so you’re not alone.
We’ve since seen major outages for a number of consumer-focused services alongside work-focused tools – fallout tracking site DownDetector shows the following…
Welcome to our live coverage of this major AWS outage.
The problems appeared to start in the early hours of Monday morning, with AWS’s US-EAST-1 region seeing issues that have caused a ripple effect across the globe.
