(Reuters) – On Monday, Amazon’s AWS, the cloud services sector of the tech giant, faced a notable outage that wreaked havoc on connectivity for many businesses worldwide. This disruption caused several popular websites and applications, including Fortnite and Snapchat, to go offline.
AWS confirmed through its status page that “we can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” This acknowledgment of the problem came as users began to report issues accessing various services.
Prominent companies such as AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and the trading app Robinhood directly linked their outages to issues with AWS. Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, shared on X that the platform was currently down due to the AWS problems, stating, “We’re working on resolving it.”
AWS is a key provider of on-demand computing resources, providing essential digital services like data storage and computing power to businesses, governments, and individuals. Consequently, a single disruption can lead to widespread outages for any service that relies on this cloud infrastructure.
As users looked to Downdetector for insight, it was revealed that Amazon’s own shopping platform, along with Prime Video and the Alexa service, experienced failures. In the gaming world, popular titles like Fortnite (managed by Epic Games), Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans were reported to be inaccessible, alongside financial services like PayPal’s Venmo and Chime.
Not only gaming and shopping websites were affected; the rideshare app Lyft also found itself nonfunctional for numerous users across the U.S. Furthermore, Signal’s President, Meredith Whittaker, confirmed that their messaging platform faced similar issues due to the AWS outage.
AWS and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for further remarks.
