Massive AWS Outage Knocks Out Gaming, Finance, & Smart Apps
A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday caused simultaneous disruptions across a large swath of the internet, taking dozens of popular websites and apps offline in unison. Users around the world woke up to find services from social media to gaming and even banking suddenly unresponsive. Platforms including Amazon’s own shopping site, the Snapchat messaging app, and hit video games like Fortnite and Roblox were among those that appeared to go down early Monday. The sudden, across-the-board failures led to a flood of reports on DownDetector (an outage tracking website) as people realized many of their favorite online services weren’t working. The fact that so many unrelated apps and sites were affected at once was a clear sign of an underlying infrastructure problem – and it didn’t take long to identify AWS, one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, as the likely cause.
Amazon soon confirmed that its cloud platform was indeed experiencing issues. The company posted an update on its AWS service status page indicating “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region. (US-EAST-1 is AWS’s hub in Northern Virginia, home to some of its biggest data centers.) In other words, something went wrong in AWS’s Virginia facilities – a critical backbone for countless online services – and that glitch cascaded across the internet. Many of Monday’s outages were in fact concentrated in the United States, especially around Virginia, according to network monitoring tools. But because AWS underpins digital services globally, the impacts were felt worldwide as various apps dependent on that infrastructure ran into trouble.
What made this outage so noticeable was the sheer range of services hit by it. On the entertainment and social side, major apps like Snapchat were down, and streaming platforms such as Hulu reportedly had issues loading. Gamers were hit hard too – the servers for massive titles like Fortnite and Roblox went offline, and even the PlayStation Network was impacted, preventing some players from logging in. Workplace tools didn’t escape unscathed either: users reported trouble connecting to communication services like Slack and Zoom, which many businesses rely on every day. Even Amazon’s own products were not spared. People encountered errors with Alexa voice assistants and Ring smart cameras, and the Amazon Prime Video streaming service became inaccessible for some. Seeing everything from security cameras to video games fail in tandem really underscored how one cloud outage could send ripples through almost every facet of online activity.
Crucially, financial services and other critical platforms were caught in the outage as well. PayPal’s popular payment app Venmo was one of the services that went down during the AWS issues. Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange, also became temporarily unavailable – preventing many users from accessing their crypto wallets. (Coinbase’s support team posted on X, formerly Twitter, to reassure customers that “all funds are safe” while they worked to fix the problem.) Even the mobile app for McDonald’s was reportedly affected, highlighting how far beyond the tech world the effects spread – from fast food to finance, a huge variety of online systems depend on AWS.
As the disruptions unfolded, several companies quickly pointed a finger at AWS as the source. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI startup Perplexity, told users on X that “the root cause is an AWS issue” and that his team was working to resolve it. Coinbase likewise cited an “AWS outage” as the reason customers couldn’t access its platform, emphasizing that its engineers were on the case and again assuring that funds were secure. In general, many service providers took to social media to apologize to their customers and explain that an Amazon Web Services problem upstream was to blame for their downtime. For its part, Amazon had not issued a detailed public comment yet beyond the technical updates on its status page – the company confirmed it was investigating the glitches but did not immediately provide a broader explanation.
Here is a comprehensive list of all the services affected by the AWS outage:
Amazon-owned services:
- Amazon.com
- Amazon Alexa
- Amazon Prime Video
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Amazon Ring
- Amazon Music
Social and messaging:
- Snapchat
- Life360
Gaming:
- Roblox
- Fortnite
- Epic Games Store
- Clash Royale
- Clash of Clans
- Rocket League
- Dead by Daylight
- VRChat
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
- PlayStation Network
- Pokémon Go
- Wordle
Productivity and education:
- Canvas (by Instructure)
- Canva
- Grammarly
- Duolingo
- Zoom
- Slack
- Xero
Finance and payments:
- Coinbase
- Robinhood
- Venmo
- Chime
Government:
- HMRC (UK’s tax authority)
Telecom:
- Vodafone
Food and retail:
- McDonald’s (mobile app)
AI and developer tools:
- Perplexity AI
By midday, AWS engineers were still in firefighting mode. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause,” Amazon wrote in an early status update, adding that they would share more information within about 45 minutes. That suggested progress was being made, though there was no firm estimate for when all affected services would be fully back to normal. In fact, many platforms started coming back online gradually as the morning went on, but some users continued to experience hiccups. It’s a developing situation, and AWS said it would keep customers updated as they learn more about what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
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