AWS Outage Causes Widespread Disruption for Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite and Others

In the predawn hours of Monday morning, the internet — that invisible thread connecting billions of lives — suddenly began to fray. From gaming sessions interrupted to smart homes silenced, users around the world awoke to find some of their most relied-upon apps and devices unexpectedly offline.

The culprit? A widespread disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the backbone of much of the modern internet — that briefly brought down some of the most popular digital services on the planet, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and Signal.

A Global Glitch in the Cloud

LONDON (AP) — Early Monday, internet users worldwide experienced major disruptions after a problem at Amazon’s cloud computing platform caused dozens of popular online services to fail.

Roughly three hours after the issues began, Amazon Web Services announced that it was beginning to recover from the outage. The company later confirmed that “most AWS service operations are succeeding normally,” though engineers continued working toward a full resolution.

For the uninitiated, AWS operates as the unseen infrastructure for much of the digital world — powering the apps, websites, and data systems of government departments, universities, and businesses, including The Associated Press itself. When AWS falters, the ripple effects are swift and wide-reaching.

The Domino Effect of a Digital Breakdown

According to DownDetector — a website that monitors internet outages — users across multiple platforms reported issues with Snapchat, Fortnite, the online brokerage Robinhood, and even the McDonald’s app. DownDetector identified the problems as “possibly related to issues at Amazon Web Services.”

Major players like Coinbase and Signal confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that their own difficulties were directly linked to the AWS outage.

Even Amazon wasn’t spared. Customers reported that Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers were unresponsive. Others couldn’t reach the Amazon website or download new Kindle books — an ironic twist that underscored just how deeply the company’s services are intertwined.

Amazon attributed the outage to a problem with its domain name system (DNS) — the digital address book that translates website names into numerical IP addresses, allowing online platforms to load on connected devices.

The first signs of trouble appeared around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when AWS reported on its Health Dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The issue escalated quickly, leading to “significant error rates” before engineers began restoring service around 6 a.m.

A Pattern of Fragility

This wasn’t an isolated incident. AWS outages have caused similar headaches in the past. In 2023, a brief failure took down numerous internet services, and in 2021, a major five-hour outage crippled airline systems, car dealerships, and payment apps. Other disruptions were recorded in 2020 and 2017 — each one serving as a reminder that even the biggest tech providers aren’t immune to technical turbulence.

Amazon reported that 64 internal AWS services were affected during the latest outage, highlighting the scope of the problem. And because AWS serves many of the world’s largest corporations and institutions, even a temporary malfunction has global consequences.

When the Cloud Sneezes, the Internet Catches a Cold

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four major cloud providers for the underlying infrastructure that when something like this happens, it can have a huge impact across a wide range of online services,” said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert with the U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

Burgess points out that “the world now runs on the cloud,” likening the internet to essential utilities such as electricity or water. With so much of daily life dependent on connected systems — from communication and finance to entertainment and home security — outages like these highlight an uncomfortable truth: the web isn’t as invincible as we’d like to think.

“When things go wrong,” Burgess added, “it’s very difficult for users to know what’s actually happening — we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox.”

The silver lining, he noted, is that these issues are typically resolved quickly and are rarely linked to cyberattacks. “This appears to be a straightforward technical fault — something broke, and Amazon will fix it,” Burgess said.

He emphasized that AWS, along with rivals Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, has “well-established processes” for handling outages — systems that generally restore operations “in hours rather than days.”

The Hidden Cost of Convenience

The outage, though short-lived, left many users reflecting on just how deeply the cloud has embedded itself in daily life. When smart speakers fall silent, payments fail, and digital communication grinds to a halt, it becomes clear that modern life is balanced precariously on a handful of servers humming in distant data centers.

It’s a reminder that the conveniences of the digital age — instant messages, voice-controlled lights, global streaming — come with a cost: dependency. And when that invisible infrastructure stumbles, even for a moment, the world feels it.

Back Online — But Not Unshaken

By dawn, most affected services were back online. AWS declared that operations had largely returned to normal around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time, reassuring users that systems were “succeeding normally.”

Still, the brief but far-reaching outage served as a wake-up call — a glimpse into the fragility of an increasingly cloud-reliant world.

As one tech analyst put it on social media shortly after services returned: “When Amazon coughs, the internet catches a cold.”

And this week, the world felt a chill.