Users around the world are currently experiencing widespread problems accessing a host of websites, apps, and online services. The root cause has been traced to a major disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors outages, it has received more than 4 million reports of issues globally.
According to reports, the issues began on Monday morning, and the outage is related to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS itself acknowledged that it was seeing “increased error rates and delays with multiple AWS services” in its US-EAST-1 region.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) operates as the backbone of much of today’s internet, offering cloud-based computing power, data storage, and server infrastructure that businesses rent to host their websites, applications, and digital services. Because so many companies depend on AWS to keep their systems running, even a minor disruption within its network can ripple across the web, taking down platforms and apps that appear to have no direct link to Amazon.
What Was Affected by the AWS outage?
Some of the services reported as affected during the outage are:
- Amazon
- Amazon Alexa
- Amazon Music
- Amazon Prime Video
- Ancestry
- Asana
- Atlassian
- Bank Of Scotland
- Blink Security
- BT
- Canva
- Clash Of Clans
- Clash Royale
- Coinbase
- Dead By Daylight
- Duolingo
- EE
- Epic Games Store
- Eventbrite
- Flickr
- Fortnite
- Halifax
- Hay Day
- HMRC
- IMDB
- Jira
- Life360
- Lloyds Bank
- My Fitness Pal
- Peloton
- Perplexity AI
- Playstation Network
- Pokemon Go
- Ring
- Roblox
- Rocket League
- Signal
- Sky Mobile
- Slack
- Smartsheet
- Snapchat
- Square
- Tidal
- Vodafone
- Wordle
- Xero
- Zoom
Why It Happened
The central factor appears to have been a failure or degradation of AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region (Virginia), which is one of the most heavily used cloud regions globally. Reportedly, many of the outages were concentrated in the US, especially around Virginia data-centre hubs.
AWS’s status update stated that engineers were actively working on mitigating the issue and understanding its root cause.
Because so many services rely on AWS’s infrastructure (servers, storage, databases, content delivery), even a localized failure in one region cascades into major disruptions elsewhere.
The nature of the disruption means many users are unable to sign into apps, access certain pages, or load content. They may also experience long load times, error messages, or timeouts when using services. Interruptions in business operations (for example, productivity apps or banking portals) are also being reported.