AWS Outage Disrupts Fortnite, Snapchat, and Major Services Worldwide
A major outage in Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS on October 20 disrupted popular apps and websites globally, marking the first major tech disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike incident.
Key Takeaways
- Major AWS outage affected millions of users worldwide
- Over 4 million users reported issues during the incident
- Fortnite, Snapchat, and financial services among those impacted
- First major tech disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction
What is Amazon Web Services?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and other digital services to companies, governments, and individuals. The platform competes with cloud services from Google and Microsoft.
Disruptions to AWS servers can cause widespread outages across websites and platforms that depend on its cloud infrastructure.
Complete List of Affected Services
According to Reuters, several major platforms experienced issues during the AWS outage:
- Social & Gaming: Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox
- Financial Services: Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Chime
- Amazon Services: Amazon shopping, Prime Video, Alexa
- Mobile Games: Clash Royale, Clash of Clans
- UK Services: Britain’s Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, HMRC
- AI Platform: Perplexity
Britain’s tax, payments, and customs authority HMRC’s website was also affected by the outage.
Scale of the Disruption
According to Ookla, the owner of outage-tracking website Downdetector, more than 4 million users reported issues during the incident. This marks the most significant cloud service disruption in recent months.
The outage highlights the widespread dependency on AWS infrastructure across multiple industries and services worldwide.
