Major AWS Outage Disrupts Services Across Mexico and Globally
Mexico City – A widespread outage impacting Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Virginia, United States, has caused disruptions to numerous online services throughout Mexico and around the world since early this morning. The failures stem from an issue within AWS’s internal system responsible for monitoring network balancers – the mechanisms that distribute internet traffic – effectively creating a digital “traffic jam.”
Downdetector Mexico reports important issues affecting financial institutions including BBVA,Santander,Citibanamex,Inbursa,Mifel,and SPEI,resulting in errors with online banking and transfers. Telecommunications providers AT&T, Movistar, Unefon, and megacable are experiencing intermittent problems with calls and mobile data. E-commerce and payment platforms mercado pago and Mercado Libre are also facing slowness in operations and payment validation. Access to government platforms,including the SAT,has been intermittently unavailable.
The outage indirectly impacts popular services like Zoom, Reddit, Tinder, Fortnite, and Netflix, all of which rely on the same AWS server infrastructure.
Amazon confirmed the root cause lies within its network balancer monitoring system. As described by one analogy,”It was as if the traffic light that organizes the world’s digital traffic broke. The data did not know where to go and a traffic jam formed on the Internet.”
Essential AWS services – EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (automatic functions), and DynamoDB (databases) – were affected, triggering cascading errors across countless platforms.
As of 1:30 p.m. central Mexico time, AWS reports a widespread recovery in the affected US-East-1 region. New server instances can now be launched normally, and network errors have decreased considerably. However, Lambda continues to experience intermittent errors.
Experts recommend users wait several hours for services to fully synchronize,avoid repeated transfer or payment attempts if applications are unresponsive,and verify facts through official institutional channels before taking action. Resetting modems or changing passwords is currently unnecessary.
