The world is in chaos thanks to the Amazon Web Services outage, with a leading tech expert warning that it could create a real world of trouble for banking issues
The service is still down(Image: AP)
The Amazon Web Services outage could create a huge “payment dispute time bomb,” an expert has warned. AWS’s web-based status monitor has been flagging an “operational issue” hitting “multiple services”. “We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region”, it reports.
The chaos started earlier this morning, around 7.30am, when seemingly half the internet went down due to so many popular sites and apps relying on Amazon’s web services.
And in among those are banks and payment platforms such as Paypal – which could lead to an even bigger problem down the line.
Banking apps and sites have been hit(Image: PA)
Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911 warned: “When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also triggers a domino effect across payment flows. Failed authorisations, duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages, all of that fuels a wave of disputes that merchants will be cleaning up for weeks.
“And once a customer files a dispute, you are already on the back foot. What I expect now is a spike in ‘I never got my service’ or ‘I was charged twice’ claims.
“Many of those won’t be fraud, just confusion. But confusion is the number one driver of chargebacks. If merchants sit back and wait for disputes to roll in, they will bleed revenue unnecessarily.”
Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911 warned of the chaos(Image: monicaec.com)
“The smart move is to get ahead of the narrative. Run duplicate charge sweeps. Push proactive notifications to affected users. Document the outage window for clean evidence. Offer fast refunds where appropriate.”
She went on: “It is cheaper to fix misunderstandings than fight losing battles in the dispute process.
“The outage will end long before the disputes do. Any business that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind. Downtime happens, but silence and slow responses are what cause real damage.”
The outage has even hit HMRC, with Time Wright – tech partner at Fladgate – warning that it “underscores the growing systemic risk from heavy national and sectoral reliance on a small number of hyperscale cloud providers”.
Other services impacted include Fortnite, Halifax, Eventbrite, Flickr, Hinge, Coinebase and Duolingo.
Popular game Pokemon Go has also been hit, as has everyone’s least favourite work platforms Slack and Trello.
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