AWS outage casts doubt on app and website security

An outage on Amazon’s web hosting service caused a sweep of app outages after the company faced issues at an east-coast operations center.

AWS hosts about 6.3% of all websites, but some of the biggest brands’ communications platforms also rely on the service.

‘I don’t trust Signal anymore.’

When reports started rolling in around 3 a.m. Eastern Time, Amazon said it was dealing with an “operational issue” that was affecting 14 services at its northern Virginia center.

Snapchat, McDonald’s, and even Ring doorbell cameras were among some of the applications affected. Even gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite were affected, as were messaging and communications programs like Zoom and Signal.

According to NBC News, about 6.5 million reports piled up that said over 1,000 sites and services had gone offline.

After 6:30 a.m., AWS said it had “fully mitigated” the issues; that was until 10:14 a.m., when it confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

The widespread outage sparked conversations about the fragility and dependency of major companies and even institutions, as the blackout affected the U.K. government’s HM Revenue and Customs department, which handles tax services.

With Signal affected, purporting to be an encrypted chat, X owner Elon Musk jumped on the opportunity to cast doubt on the app and direct readers to his own version, X chat.

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“I don’t trust Signal anymore,” Musk wrote on X, responding to a user alarmed that Signal was not working.

Just over 20 minutes later, Musk started promoting his own messenger: “The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.”

This is a contrast from May 2024, when Musk openly praised AWS for developing generative AI that helps write website code.

“Impressive. My hat is off to what Amazon has accomplished with AWS,” Musk wrote at the time.

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This is not the first time Signal has been accused of being insecure. In a 2023 interview with the popular online influencer group Nelk Boys, conservative host Tucker Carlson claimed the NSA had hacked his Signal account around the time he was attempting to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Carlson said he got a call from someone in Washington, D.C., who sat down with him and had knowledge of his conversations about planning an interview with Putin because the NSA had allegedly read Carlson’s messages.

An NGO called Article 19, which describes itself as a group “defending freedom of expression and information around the world,” told NBC News that the organization felt the disruptions were “democratic failures.”

“When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles.”

According to Wojciech Gawroński, who runs the website AWS Maniac, Amazon has suffered one to two major outages per year between 2011 and 2021.

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