Expert comment: Outage at Amazon Web Services

Our experts comment after a major outage today has affected hundreds of websites and apps around the world. Amazon Web Services went down earlier this morning.

Dr. Sadaf Hina, Lecturer of Cybersecurity, The University of Salford said:

"Such a large-scale technical outage could stem from various causes, including system misconfigurations, a failed update or patch, DNS (as Lee mentioned) hardware malfunction, or even a potential service exploit. However, these remain assumptions until formally confirmed by AWS.

"Earlier today, I personally experienced issues with Life360, which stopped functioning properly. After searching online for updates, I found no official explanation at the time, and the app continues to malfunction. This is just one example. Millions of users and businesses worldwide are being affected by this outage. Unfortunately, such incidents often create opportunities for scammers and social engineers to launch phishing campaigns, exploiting users' confusion and urgency.

"It's therefore essential for organisations to proactively raise awareness through internal and external communications, advising users to remain cautious of unsolicited emails or links claiming to offer "fixes" or "updates" related to the outage. Clear, timely communication can significantly reduce the risk of secondary cyberattacks triggered by such large-scale disruptions."

And Lee Griffiths, Senior Lecturer in Cpmputer Science said:

"Amazon Web Services provides a large part of the world's virtual infrastructure, handling both data storage and processing at scale including payment systems. Their systems are built with failure and redundancy in mind, so the services themselves are rarely the root cause of major issues.

"However, we've seen similar outages before (Facebook, 2021) that were actually related to the Domain Name System (DNS). In simple terms, DNS is like the internet's address book - it translates website names (like amazon.com) into the numerical addresses computers use to find each other. Even though DNS is distributed, it can still become a single point of failure if something goes wrong or is misconfigured, making services appear offline even when they're still running.

"At Salford, our student cohort in Cyber Security has grown significantly in recent years as global digital infrastructure becomes ever more critical - and increasingly exposed to both technical failure and malicious attack. This awareness shapes our teaching, research, and collaboration with industry as we work to build resilience, improve digital trust, and prepare graduates to meet the complex security challenges of the connected world."

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