Major Amazon Web Services outage leaves websites and apps lagging across the world

Police arrested a man at Atlanta’s bustling airport on Monday after getting a tip from his family that he was planning to shoot up the place, and found an assault rifle and ammunition in his truck outside, the city’s police chief said.

Billy Joe Cagle, of Cartersville, Georgia, had described his plan to shoot up the world’s busiest airport on a social media livestream, Chief Darin Schierbaum said during a news conference.

“The Cartersville Police Department was alerted by the family of Mr. Cagle that he was streaming on social media that he was headed to the Atlanta airport, in their words, to ‘shoot it up,’ and the family stated that he was in possession of an assault rifle,” Schierbaum said, describing Cagle as a “convicted felon.”

Cagle, 49, arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in a Chevrolet pickup truck that was parked right outside the doors to the airport terminal. When police went to the vehicle, they found an AR-15 with 27 rounds of ammunition, Schierbaum said.

“We’re here today briefing you on a success and not a tragedy because a family saw something and said something,” the chief said.

Cartersville police Capt. Greg Sparacio, whose department received the initial tip from family members, said Cagle “had the intention to inflict harm to as many people as he could.”

During the news conference, police showed surveillance video that shows Cagle arriving at the airport and body-camera video of his arrest.

A Chevrolet flatbed pickup truck is seen arriving curbside at the airport terminal around 9:30 a.m. and then a man police identified as Cagle is seen entering the airport a few minutes later. He walks over to the TSA security checkpoint and had “high interest in that area,” Schierbaum said.

Body-camera footage shows Atlanta police officers, who had a photo of Cagle provided by his family on their phones, approach him and start asking him questions before taking him into custody. As they take him to the ground and put handcuffs on him, Cagle can be heard yelling.

Cagle has been charged with making terroristic threats, criminal attempt to commit aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and possession of a firearm by a felon, Schierbaum said.

Cagle was booked into the Clayton County Detention Facility on Monday evening, according to online jail records. Attempts to reach his family and co-workers through multiple phone numbers and emails were unsuccessful. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he had a lawyer who could comment on the charges.

Atlanta police will work with federal authorities to determine how he obtained the gun, “which he was not able to legally possess,” Schierbaum said.

Mayor Andre Dickens said “we’re thankful to God” that a tragedy was averted.

“We’re thankful to God and to good information, and good intel, and good people for this crisis being averted,” the mayor said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X, “I am thankful this individual was taken into custody by law enforcement before harming anyone.”

Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.

Major Amazon Web Services outage leaves websites and apps lagging across the world

Websites and services across the United States and around the world were struggling to recover Monday after a problem at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has left leading games, publishers, streaming platforms and other apps unusable to millions of people.

The cloud hosting service that underpins much of the web and everyday online tools went offline after 3:00 a.m. because of a problem with one its core database products, the company said.

Problems have persisted through Monday morning, according to the company.

The outage has affected users of sites ranging from Snapchat to the McDonald’s app and Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras to gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. It underlines the fragility of companies — including financial services — that use cloud-based servers to host their data, and how suddenly businesses across the globe can be affected by an unplanned outage.

AWS first reported a problem at 3:11 a.m. ET and said it was dealing with an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services in its center in northern Virginia, at its U.S.-East-1 Region center.

The Downdetector website received 6.5 million reports that more than 1,000 sites and services across the world were offline.

Snapchat said that some users were “having issues,” with some posting on social media that their friends’ lists and daily streaks had disappeared.

United Airlines, T-Mobile, Starbucks and McDonald were also having issues. Delta said it had seen minor delays after the outage. The U.S. federal health insurance program Medicare also seemed to be affected. Users attempting to participate in its open enrollment period said they couldn’t log into the website Monday afternoon. The British government was also impacted, with its HM Revenue and Customs website not accessible to some users. United Healthcare’s provider search tool continued to malfunction throughout Monday.

At 6:35 a.m. ET, AWS said the database problem that caused the outage was “fully mitigated” but warned that there may still be delays.

But at 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” saying it was investigating.

The problem stemmed from an error with Amazon’s EC2 internal network, which impacted AWS services including DynamoDB, SQS and Amazon Connect, the company said. “The root cause is an underlying internal subystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” the company said in a statement at 11:43 a.m. ET, referring to technology that distributes traffic across various servers. AWS says it is limiting new activity requests from customers as it works to restore full functionality to its services.

The service also went down in 2023 and in 2021, when customers found that they couldn’t access airline reservations and payment apps during the five-hour outage.

This time, social media posts reported problems with cloud-based games, social networks and Amazon’s own services like Prime Video and Kindle.

Messaging services such as Signal were also affected, prompting Article 19, a nongovernmental organization that promotes freedom of expression, to warn of the democratic consequences of such outages.

“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re 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,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, Article 19’s head of digital.

Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said its services were unavailable because of the AWS outage.

The trading app Robinhood, the payments app Venmo and the language learning app DuoLingo also appeared to be experiencing issues on Monday.

Media organizations, including Disney and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, were also apparently affected, according to Downdetector. The Associated Press said that it was also experiencing issues and that it had enabled its “AP Backup” system for people to access breaking news.

AWS customers were unable to report the problem because its automated support ticking system was also offline.

AWS stores customers’ data and offers a range of online activities. It is a major player in the cloud computing, having recently invested in artificial intelligence products. It’s also highly lucrative — it made $107 billion in the 2024 financial year, 17% of Amazon’s total revenue.

Brian Cheung and Bruna Horvath contributed.

Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.

Major Amazon Web Services outage leaves websites and apps lagging across the world

Websites and services across the United States and around the world were struggling to recover Monday after a problem at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has left leading games, publishers, streaming platforms and other apps unusable to millions of people.

The cloud hosting service that underpins much of the web and everyday online tools went offline after 3:00 a.m. because of a problem with one its core database products, the company said.

Problems have persisted through Monday morning, according to the company.

The outage has affected users of sites ranging from Snapchat to the McDonald’s app and Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras to gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. It underlines the fragility of companies — including financial services — that use cloud-based servers to host their data, and how suddenly businesses across the globe can be affected by an unplanned outage.

AWS first reported a problem at 3:11 a.m. ET and said it was dealing with an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services in its center in northern Virginia, at its U.S.-East-1 Region center.

The Downdetector website received 6.5 million reports that more than 1,000 sites and services across the world were offline.

Snapchat said that some users were “having issues,” with some posting on social media that their friends’ lists and daily streaks had disappeared.

United Airlines, T-Mobile, Starbucks and McDonald were also having issues. Delta said it had seen minor delays after the outage. The U.S. federal health insurance program Medicare also seemed to be affected. Users attempting to participate in its open enrollment period said they couldn’t log into the website Monday afternoon. The British government was also impacted, with its HM Revenue and Customs website not accessible to some users. United Healthcare’s provider search tool continued to malfunction throughout Monday.

At 6:35 a.m. ET, AWS said the database problem that caused the outage was “fully mitigated” but warned that there may still be delays.

But at 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” saying it was investigating.

The problem stemmed from an error with Amazon’s EC2 internal network, which impacted AWS services including DynamoDB, SQS and Amazon Connect, the company said. “The root cause is an underlying internal subystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” the company said in a statement at 11:43 a.m. ET, referring to technology that distributes traffic across various servers. AWS says it is limiting new activity requests from customers as it works to restore full functionality to its services.

The service also went down in 2023 and in 2021, when customers found that they couldn’t access airline reservations and payment apps during the five-hour outage.

This time, social media posts reported problems with cloud-based games, social networks and Amazon’s own services like Prime Video and Kindle.

Messaging services such as Signal were also affected, prompting Article 19, a nongovernmental organization that promotes freedom of expression, to warn of the democratic consequences of such outages.

“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re 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,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, Article 19’s head of digital.

Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said its services were unavailable because of the AWS outage.

The trading app Robinhood, the payments app Venmo and the language learning app DuoLingo also appeared to be experiencing issues on Monday.

Media organizations, including Disney and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, were also apparently affected, according to Downdetector. The Associated Press said that it was also experiencing issues and that it had enabled its “AP Backup” system for people to access breaking news.

AWS customers were unable to report the problem because its automated support ticking system was also offline.

AWS stores customers’ data and offers a range of online activities. It is a major player in the cloud computing, having recently invested in artificial intelligence products. It’s also highly lucrative — it made $107 billion in the 2024 financial year, 17% of Amazon’s total revenue.

Brian Cheung and Bruna Horvath contributed.

Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.