Massive AWS global outage disrupts major platforms for hours, some services still affected

A major outage hit Amazon Web Services early this morning, disrupting critical cloud infrastructure for about four hours. Following initial interruptions shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS acknowledged the issue on its status page. Amazon engineers traced the disruption to network connectivity problems in core services, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service, and Amazon Connect.

The incident quickly cascaded across the web, affecting platforms such as Amazon, Prime Video, Amazon Alexa, Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic Games Store, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Reddit, and many others. Alexa users were among the most affected, as the service couldn’t process voice commands or execute routines during the downtime.

By around 5 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS engineers reported potentially identifying the issue’s root cause, but no official technical explanation was released. Amazon confirmed portions of the US-EAST-1 region still faced operational issues, with secondary effects in other global regions. Some platforms like the previously mentioned Perplexity or Epic Games already announced full restoration of service later in the morning, though several others, including banking apps still remain offline, so if you’re wondering why some of the services you use aren’t working, at least you know it’s not just you 🤷‍♂️.