Amazon Web Services (AWS) is facing an outage that has shut down some of the world’s biggest digital platforms, including Amazon.com, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase, and Canva, leaving millions of users unable to access essential online services.
The outage, which originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, began in the early hours of Monday and quickly spread beyond the United States, affecting Europe, Asia, and Africa.
According to AWS’s own status dashboard, multiple services are currently “impacted” due to “increased error rates and latencies,” with engineers “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”
For users, the impact has been immediate and widespread. Alexa devices have gone silent, unable to respond to voice commands or execute daily routines like alarms and reminders.
Developers and businesses using AWS’s cloud network, from Airtable to Perplexity AI and the McDonald’s app, have also been hit. Even high-traffic entertainment platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Rainbow Six Siege are offline.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, has logged over 2,000 incident reports in the U.S. alone since the outage began. On Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), frustrated users across time zones have shared screenshots of failed connections and frozen dashboards.
“Perplexity is down right now,” confirmed Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, in a post on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
Amazon, in its latest public update at 3:51 a.m. ET, noted that it would provide further information every 45 minutes “or sooner if we have additional information to share.” However, at the time of writing, there is still no estimated timeline for full restoration.
This isn’t the first time AWS’s US-EAST-1 region has been the source of widespread disruption. Similar outages in December 2021, November 2020, and June 2023 took down high-profile platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Slack, Zoom, and Twitch.
Each incident revealed an issue across the tech industry, that a large portion of the global internet depends heavily on a single cloud provider’s regional infrastructure.
The current outage appears to have hit both consumer-facing apps and backend systems, including AWS’s own Support Center and Support API, which organisations rely on for case creation and troubleshooting.
While AWS has reiterated that engineers are investigating the problem, the lack of transparency about the specific cause of the outage is driving industry-wide anxiety. Many are now revisiting familiar cases of how much centralisation is too much when the internet’s backbone depends on just a handful of companies.
For now, millions of users are in a holding pattern, waiting, refreshing, and hoping their devices come back online soon.
