Amazon's cloud unit reports outage; several websites down

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud division of Amazon, experienced a major outage on Monday. This caused connection problems for businesses and users worldwide, affecting many popular apps and platforms.

Affected services

The outage impacted several well-known services, as shown by spikes in user reports on Downdetector. Some of the disrupted services are:

• Snapchat
• Amazon Alexa
• Reddit
• Roblox
• Fortnite
• Amazon Prime Video
• Signal
• Coinbase
• Clash of Clans
• Canva

AWS supports both Amazon’s own products and services run by other companies. It offers computing power, storage, and more to clients including businesses, governments, and individuals. So, when AWS goes down, it can cause widespread issues across the internet.

AWS is a key competitor to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Perplexity AI, led by Aravind Srinivas, was also hit by the outage. He confirmed on X and said, "The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it."


Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, also posted on X to confirm that their messaging app was affected.

Amazon’s response to outage

In a statement on its status page, AWS explained: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region."

The company said that the problem was linked to a DNS issue, the system that turns website names into IP addresses to load web pages and apps properly.

Later, AWS updated users, saying the outage was “fully mitigated”, with most services beginning to return to normal after several hours of disruption.

Elon Musk flexes X amid outage

Billionaire Elon Musk took the opportunity to promote his social media platform, X, as a more secure and independent option. Posting on X, he simply said: “X works.”

He later said, “The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head."

“You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls,” he added.