NEW YORK — A major AWS outage early Monday disrupted several popular online platforms, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, and other cloud based services.
The failure, traced to Amazon Web Services’ US EAST 1 region, caused widespread connectivity issues and increased error rates across numerous digital networks worldwide.
According to Amazon’s official AWS Service Health Dashboard, the company began investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” at around 3:11 a.m.
Eastern Time. Engineers said they were “actively engaged and working to mitigate the issue,” though users continued to report outages hours later.
Amazon Web Services is the backbone for thousands of companies and apps, hosting everything from entertainment platforms to financial and retail systems.
The US EAST 1 data center, located in Northern Virginia, is one of AWS’s most heavily used regions and a frequent source of ripple effects during disruptions.
Previous outages in this region have had similar global consequences. Major downtime events occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023, temporarily knocking out streaming, gaming, and retail systems.
Monday’s major AWS outage appears to follow the same pattern, underlining how a single regional failure can impact global operations.
Online forums were filled with reports of failures in Alexa routines, Fortnite servers, and business apps such as Airtable, Canva, and Perplexity AI.
“It’s the same type of disruption we’ve seen before in US EAST 1, only this time it seems broader,” said Michael Rivera, a cloud analyst at DigitalCore Research.
Cloud infrastructure experts said the event demonstrates the risks of relying on a single region for mission critical services. “When US EAST 1 stumbles, the internet feels it,” said Dr. Maria Chen, senior systems architect at TechSphere Consulting.
“That region acts as the command center for many AWS control plane functions, so even apps hosted elsewhere may experience slowdowns or failures.”
Another analyst, Adrian Miles of CloudWatch Advisors, noted that latency and error spikes often indicate internal resource or load balancing problems rather than total network failure.
“These symptoms suggest backend strain possibly linked to scaling or database coordination inside AWS,” he said. Experts also warned that such incidents highlight the “single point of dependency” problem in cloud computing.
AWS powers a third of the public internet, Miles added. “When it goes down, the effects cascade quickly and unpredictably.”
The outage tracking platform Downdetector showed more than 15,000 reports within the first hour of the disruption, with users across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia affected.
Reports peaked shortly after 4 am ET, when Snapchat, Fortnite, and Alexa users flooded social media platforms complaining of downtime.
AWS outages are not new. The December 2021 incident disabled several delivery and streaming services, while the June 2023 failure was traced to an internal capacity subsystem.
Each time, AWS published a root cause summary promising improvements in redundancy and response. “This pattern shows the scale and complexity of AWS operations,” Rivera said.
“Even small misconfigurations or software failures can trigger a domino effect when millions of servers are interconnected.” For many users, the disruption was more than a temporary inconvenience.
Sarah Lopez, a small business owner in Chicago, said her e-commerce dashboard stopped responding for over an hour. “We couldn’t process online orders or update inventory. Everything froze,” Lopez said. “It’s a reminder of how dependent we are on the cloud.”
On Reddit, users reported Alexa devices ignoring commands or failing to activate morning alarms. “My smart lights didn’t turn off, my alarm didn’t ring, and Alexa just said ‘something went wrong,’” wrote one user from Seattle.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, confirmed the connection to AWS on X (formerly Twitter). “Perplexity is down right now due to an AWS issue. Our teams are monitoring it closely and will restore full service soon,” he posted.
AWS has not disclosed the root cause of the major AWS outage, but engineers said they were “working to understand and mitigate” the impact. The company promised to issue a detailed post event summary once stability returns.
Industry experts expect renewed discussions about multi region architecture and cloud redundancy following this event. “It’s time companies treat US EAST 1 as a single failure point and build active failover strategies,” said Dr. Chen.
Analysts also believe regulators may take a closer look at cloud dependency in critical infrastructure sectors such as banking, healthcare, and logistics. “The outage underscores how much of modern digital life depends on one provider,” said Rivera.
The major AWS outage that disrupted Fortnite, Alexa, and Snapchat once again demonstrates the fragility of centralized cloud systems.
As Amazon engineers race to restore full functionality, millions of users and businesses are reminded how intertwined their digital lives are with the world’s largest cloud provider.
The incident adds to a growing list of AWS disruptions over the past five years and may accelerate efforts to diversify cloud strategies, ensuring the next outage doesn’t take half the internet down with it.