Subscribe Now! Get features like
A global outage hit Amazon web services (AWS) on Monday, disrupting many websites and services including Amazon Prime, Snapchat, Perplexity, Fortnite, Canva and Duolingo. Messages on the maintenance site for AWS confirmed “increased error rates” for multiple services and said its engineers were working to restore operations.
Downdetector reported over 2,000 outage incidents for AWS in the United States, with users flagging problems accessing a wide range of digital services and apps. Amazon’s own ecosystem was not spared – Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa all faced connectivity issues, the monitoring site showed. Track AWS outage live updates
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed in a post that the root cause of the disruptions was an AWS-related issue, which affected the company’s operations temporarily.
Alongside these major platforms, several other popular apps and websites saw intermittent outages, including Venmo, the peer-to-peer payments service operated by PayPal.
Reports of service failures also came in for a wide range of digital tools and platforms that rely on AWS servers — among them Snapchat, Crunchyroll, Roblox, Whatnot, Rainbow Six Siege, Coinbase, Canva, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, The New York Times, Life360, Fortnite, Apple TV, Verizon, Chime, McDonald’s App, CollegeBoard, Wordle, and PUBG Battlegrounds.
While some services have since begun to recover, users across social media continued to report access issues through Monday afternoon. Amazon has not yet released an official statement detailing the cause or duration of the outage.
Amazon’s cloud service underpins a large chunk of the internet, accounting for about a third of the cloud market. Any outage has major ripple effects.
Financial platforms Coinbase and Robinhood said that the AWS issue was affecting their financial services and artificial intelligence company Perplexity said the disruption had impacted the stability of its website. UK football team Tottenham Hotspur said in an email to fans that its e-ticketing platform was affected. A spokesman for British tax authority HMRC also said its site was down due to the AWS problem.
Most glitches on major tech systems are fixed quickly. Still, interconnected technology systems have meant that problems at one company can cause catastrophic impacts across the global economy. Last year, a faulty software update at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.