Major AWS Outage Disrupts Snapchat, Fortnite, and Hundreds of Websites
A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has caused widespread internet disruption globally, leaving millions unable to access popular platforms like Snapchat, Fortnite, and government services.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon Web Services outage affects hundreds of websites and apps globally
- Major platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, and UK government services impacted
- Issue traced to Amazon’s US-East-1 data center in North Virginia
- Experts warn of infrastructure fragility and need for better backup systems
Outage Scope and Impact
The outage began around 8am BST Monday, with DownDetector reporting over 6,000 incidents from US users and 1,600+ from UK customers. The disruption stems from problems at Amazon’s critical North Virginia data center (us-east-1), which accounts for 75% of reported issues.
Major British banks including Lloyds and Halifax were affected, along with GOV.UK services used for visa applications, passport renewals, and tax management. Amazon’s own services including Amazon.com, Alexa, Ring, and Prime Video also experienced disruptions.
Expert Analysis
Jake Moore, security advisor at ESET, stated the outage likely resulted from an “internal error” but couldn’t rule out a cyberattack. “While a cyberattack can’t be ruled out until AWS releases its full post-incident report, there’s no current evidence of hacking, data breaches or coordinated attacks,” he told the Daily Mail.
Moore described the incident as a “cascading failure where one system’s slowdown disrupted others” across the platform, highlighting global dependency on “relatively fragile infrastructures with very limited backup plans.”
Technical Breakdown
Dr. Manny Niri, cybersecurity lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, identified a “serious failure” in the main AWS US-East-1 region. “This does not seem to be just a small software problem but may involve a failure in a key part of the internet’s backbone,” he explained.
Dr. Niri emphasized this incident serves as “a strong reminder that relying on only one cloud region is very risky” and urged companies to implement multiple regions, failover systems, and robust offline backups.
Affected Platforms
- Social Media: Snapchat, Instagram
- Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Pokémon GO, Xbox Network, PlayStation Network
- Productivity: Slack, Trello, Asana, Jira Software
- Finance: Coinbase, Square, HMRC
- Entertainment: Amazon Prime Video, IMDb, Tidal
- Government: GOV.UK services
- Smart Home: Amazon Alexa, Ring, Blink Security
AWS acknowledged the “operational issue” affecting multiple services and confirmed engineers are “actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”
