Amazon’s cloud services arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered a major outage on Monday, disrupting popular websites and apps across the world, including Fortnite, Snapchat, and several financial and gaming platforms.
AWS Admits Increased Error Rates:
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said in an official update on its status page. The US-EAST-1 region, based in Virginia, is one of the company’s largest and most critical server hubs.
Tech Companies Report Widespread Impact:
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and trading app Robinhood all confirmed that AWS was the root cause of their service disruptions. “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an
AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” said Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on X (formerly Twitter).
What AWS Does?
Amazon Web Services provides cloud computing power, data storage, and other digital infrastructure to millions of users — from startups and governments to tech giants. Because so many companies rely on AWS, even minor issues can lead to large-scale outages across the internet.
Amazon and AWS Yet to Comment:
Both Amazon and AWS did not immediately respond to media requests for comment. However, reports from Downdetector showed that Amazon’s main shopping site, Prime Video, and Alexa were also facing connectivity problems.
Gaming and Financial Apps Affected:
Popular gaming titles such as Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans were hit by the outage. Financial services including PayPal’s Venmo and Chime also experienced disruptions, according to outage tracking websites.
Ride-Sharing and Messaging Apps Also Go Down:
Lyft, a major ride-hailing app and Uber rival, went down for thousands of users in the United States. Signal, the secure messaging platform, confirmed that it too was affected. “Our platform was hit by the AWS outage,” said Signal President Meredith Whittaker on X.
AWS Competes With Google and Microsoft:
AWS remains one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, competing directly with Google
Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Despite its reliability record, Monday’s outage highlighted how a single disruption in cloud infrastructure can ripple across multiple industries worldwide.