Major AWS Outage Disrupts Global Online Services
A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday crippled numerous online platforms globally, affecting AI services, e-commerce sites, popular websites, and online games.
Key Services Affected
- Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant
- AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity
- Social media app Snapchat
- Online games including Fortnite
- Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services
- Platforms like Airtable, Canva, and McDonald’s app
The disruption originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 Region, with Amazon confirming it was investigating “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.
Service Disruption Timeline
AWS first reported issues at 3:11 AM Eastern Time, stating they were working to “mitigate the issue and understand root cause.” By 5:27 AM ET, Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery,” noting that “most requests should now be succeeding” while working through a backlog of queued requests.
Company Confirmation
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed on social media platform X: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
This marks the latest in a series of AWS outages affecting the US-EAST-1 region, following similar widespread disruptions in 2020, 2021, and 2023 that caused extended downtime for various sites and applications.
