Amazon Web Services (AWS), a very large online platform under the EU Digital Services Act, suffered what it described as an “operational issue” in its US-East (N. Virginia) region on Monday, 20 October. The problem stemmed from an error in its non-relational database DynamoDB. This, in turn, knocked out or degraded many trading infrastructure and data services worldwide.
Companies reporting or linked to disruptions included London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) data services, as well as consumer platforms such as Snapchat and several .gov services, according to the website Down detector.
According to Amazon, the issue first started at 749 AM UK time on 20 October, the potential root cause (DynamoDB issue) was announced at 1001 AM, this initial issue was resolved by 1024 AM UK time. AWS suffered further network problems related to cascading errors in its EC2 virtual server services that took until 1101 PM UK time to be fully resolved.
LSEG said all its systems were live at the time, but a spokesperson told Global Trading: “Due to an issue with Amazon Web Services (AWS) some of our customers experienced problems accessing some of our applications. There was no impact to the London Stock Exchange, LCH Ltd or LCH SA.”
LSE has a deal with AWS for its tick data, to allow clients to access data without having to download it from LSE servers. LSEG also has a wider deal with Microsoft for its workstation platform.
Nasdaq, which had touted a strong partnership with AWS, did not report any issues with its systems.
Amid what appeared to be a widespread outage, BMLL—the market data, analytics and compute firm which counts Optiver among its shareholders—told clients it had experienced a complete service outage for a few hours across its offerings and attributed the interruption to the AWS regional issue.
AWS said engineers were working to mitigate and resolve the problem. UK sites, including Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and HMRC, also saw major disruptions.
By lunchtime in Europe on 20 October, AWS services—along with trading infrastructure and data services, including BMLL—were being restored, while some retail brokerage services, amongst which Robinhood, were still experiencing issues.
Robinhood did not respond to requests for comment.
