A massive outage caused by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server failure temporarily knocked offline online services around the world, including in the United States and Korea. Services across a range of industries—from generative artificial intelligence (AI) to cryptocurrency exchanges, games, and e-commerce—were briefly paralyzed.
According to the information technology (IT) industry on Feb. 20, AWS said in a notice that it had identified significant errors in the US-EAST-1 region in the eastern United States, adding that during this period customers might be unable to create or update support cases. AWS is the No. 1 global cloud provider, and corporations around the world rent AWS infrastructure instead of using their own servers.
The eastern region in question is one of AWS's core data centers. AWS pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution error as a potential cause of the outage.
As a result, Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said right after the outage that many users could not connect due to the AWS service interruption and that all funds were safely protected.
AI search service Perplexity also stopped functioning normally, displaying an error message to users that said there was a problem. Perplexity Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the root cause was on AWS's side.
In addition, global services such as Amazon.com, Alexa, Disney+, McDonald's, Reddit, Fortnite, Roblox, and Nintendo experienced temporary access issues. According to foreign media reports, AWS received more than 6,000 error reports that day.
In Korea, some services such as Battlegrounds and Samsung.com also experienced access errors. The Ministry of Science and ICT said AWS is subject to mandatory reporting of major outages and completed its report to the government immediately after the incident. It added that the outage was limited to B2C services directly used by the public and that domestic corporations such as Samsung Electronics quickly restored service through redundancy measures, explaining that, for now, the scale of damage is limited.