A global outage on Monday crippled Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), causing widespread disruptions across multiple online platforms and digital services, including Amazon Prime, Fortnite, Alexa, Perplexity AI, Snapchat, and Duolingo.
According to AWS’s official maintenance dashboard, engineers detected “increased error rates” affecting several core services early in the day. The issue, traced to a critical infrastructure zone in the US-East-1 region of northern Virginia, took engineers roughly three hours to resolve.
“By 10:35 GMT, the issue had been corrected, and most AWS service operations are succeeding normally,” the company said in a status update. However, it acknowledged that “some services continued to experience residual impact.”
Widespread Internet Disruption
The outage’s ripple effects were felt globally. Internet monitoring platform Downdetector reported surges in user complaints from around the world as numerous platforms dependent on AWS went offline or slowed down.
Among the affected were Reddit, Signal, and major video streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+, alongside Delta Air Lines’ online operations. In Europe, telecom operators, UK banks, WhatsApp, and Tinder also experienced connection issues.
AWS, which powers vast portions of the world’s internet infrastructure, provides cloud computing services to millions of companies, governments, and developers worldwide.
Dependence Raises Concerns
Financial analyst Michael Hewson described the incident as a reminder of the global economy’s dependence on a handful of major tech providers.
“This outage shows how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted,” Hewson said.
“On an economic level, it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.”
This is not the first time AWS has suffered a large-scale disruption. Previous outages have similarly affected global websites and digital services, underscoring how deeply integrated the platform is within the global digital ecosystem.
While normal service has largely been restored, some users and businesses continue to report intermittent connectivity issues and slower performance as AWS engineers monitor system stability.
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