Key Takeaways
- AWS US-EAST-1 region outage disrupted major services like ChatGPT, Alexa, and Snapchat.
- Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery” by 5:27 AM ET after hours of disruption.
- This marks a recurring issue for the critical AWS region, with similar outages in 2020, 2021, and 2023.
A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday caused widespread disruption, taking down popular online services including ChatGPT, Amazon’s Alexa, Snapchat, and the online game Fortnite. The incident affected the critical US-EAST-1 region, with Amazon confirming it was investigating increased error rates and latencies.
Services Impacted by the AWS Outage
The outage had a domino effect on numerous platforms reliant on AWS infrastructure. Affected services included:
- AI tools: ChatGPT and Perplexity
- Smart assistants: Amazon Alexa
- Social and entertainment: Snapchat, Fortnite, Epic Games Store
- Productivity apps: Airtable, Canva
- Retail: McDonald’s app
Users reported Alexa was unresponsive, while Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed on X that his platform was down due to the AWS issue.
Timeline of the Disruption and Recovery
AWS first reported issues at 3:11 AM Eastern Time. Amazon stated they were “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” promising updates every 45 minutes.
The turning point came at 5:27 AM ET when Amazon announced “significant signs of recovery,” noting that “most requests should now be succeeding.” The company added that teams were working through a backlog of queued requests.
A History of AWS US-EAST-1 Outages
This is not an isolated incident for the US-EAST-1 region. Similar widespread disruptions occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023, causing extended downtime for countless websites and applications that depend on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.
