A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted access to dozens of websites and applications across multiple countries, affecting millions of users and businesses that rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.
The disruption began early Monday in AWS’s U.S.-East-1 region — one of its largest data hubs — and quickly spread, impacting global services connected through the same network. Users reported problems accessing Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa, along with third-party platforms such as Perplexity AI, Canva, Robinhood, Venmo, and Snapchat.
Downdetector, an independent outage tracker, showed spikes in problem reports from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and several European countries. The outage also briefly affected gaming services including Fortnite and Roblox.
AWS confirmed the issue on its official status dashboard, citing “increased error rates and latency” in the U.S.-East-1 region. “Our teams are actively working to mitigate the issue and identify the root cause,” the company said.
Although Amazon did not immediately specify the reason for the failure, engineers said the fault likely originated in a core networking component that underpins several global services. By Monday evening, partial recovery had begun, but users in multiple regions continued to experience slow loading and intermittent connectivity.
The widespread disruption underscored the heavy dependence of online platforms on a small number of cloud service providers. AWS, which powers thousands of businesses worldwide, has previously experienced outages in the same region, leading to widespread service interruptions.
Analysts said the incident would reignite debates about cloud reliability and resilience, especially as more companies consolidate their infrastructure with major providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
As of late Monday, AWS said it was “monitoring stability across services” while continuing to restore normal operations. (Newswire)⁰