Major AWS Outage Disrupts Dozens of Services, From Alexa to Banking Apps
A massive internet disruption linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) knocked dozens of major websites and apps offline early Monday, affecting everything from banking apps to video games, smart devices, and streaming services.
Amazon acknowledged the issue, confirming it was seeing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The company said it’s actively working to identify the problem and restore service. The disruption began around 3:11AM ET, and by 9:20AM, outage tracker Downdetector was reporting over 2,000 incident reports in the US alone.
Who’s Affected?
The list is long—and growing. AWS powers the backend for countless digital services, so when it stumbles, the impact is far-reaching. Affected platforms include:
- Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Prime Video, and Amazon Music
- Snapchat, Zoom, Slack, Signal, and Duolingo
- Gaming platforms like Fortnite, Clash of Clans, Roblox, Rocket League, and PlayStation Network
- Financial services, including Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland
- UK government site HMRC
- Fitness and lifestyle apps like Peloton and MyFitnessPal
- Business tools including Canva, Airtable, and Atlassian services like Jira and Confluence
Users on Reddit reported Alexa wasn't responding, alarms weren’t going off, and smart home routines were completely failing.
AI search startup Perplexity was one of the first to flag issues, with the company saying the AWS outage was “affecting the stability of the website.” CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed on X: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
No Timeline Yet for a Fix
Amazon hasn’t offered a clear explanation for what triggered the outage. The company has said only that its engineers were “immediately engaged” and are investigating the root cause.
Outage tracking service ThousandEyes shows that the disruption is especially concentrated in Virginia, where a large portion of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure is based. This region, known as US-EAST-1, has seen several large-scale outages in recent years, with similar incidents reported in 2023, 2021, and 2020.
There’s no telling yet when full service will return, but if history is any guide, users may be facing hours of intermittent outages across multiple platforms.
For now, Amazon says: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”
