Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday, causing connectivity issues for many companies around the world and disrupting services for several popular websites and apps including Fortnite and Snapchat.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
AWS said in its latest update it was “seeing significant signs of recovery” and that it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon Web Services said in a previous update.
Gaming, financial services affected
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector.
Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said.
Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the U.S.
Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to DownDetecor’s U.K. website. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website too was hit by the outage.
AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services, with the three comprising about 63 per cent of the cloud infrastructures market. AWS has long been the market share leader.
The AWS outage is the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction that hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports globally.
