Amazon AWS outage causes Fortnite, Snapchat among major apps to go dark

Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday that took down several popular apps including Fortnite and Snapchat and caused connectivity issues for many companies around the world.

AWS said it was seeing increased “error rates and latencies” for multiple services. “We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” it said in its latest update.

The AWS outage is the first major internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction that hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports globally.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.

AWS directed Reuters to its status page when requested for a comment. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

PERPLEXITY, COINBASE, PRIME VIDEO DOWN

AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS.

“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.

Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector.

Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said.

Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the U.S.

Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker confirmed on X that the company’s platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.

BRITISH FIRMS AFFECTED

Britain’s Lloyd Bank Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to DownDetecor’s UK website. The country’s tax, payments and customs authority HMRC’s website too was hit by the outage.

However, billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of social media company X, said that his platform continued to work. “X works,” he said, without commenting further.