SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon announced that its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was recovering from a major outage that disrupted online services worldwide on Monday.
AWS, which provides remote computing infrastructure to numerous governments, universities, and major corporations—including The Associated Press—experienced widespread disruptions that rippled across the internet.
According to outage-tracking site DownDetector, users reported issues with popular apps and platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Robinhood, the McDonald’s app, and several others. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and messaging platform Signal also confirmed on X that their services were affected due to the AWS outage.
The first signs of trouble appeared around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time, when AWS posted on its Health Dashboard that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region.” The company later acknowledged “significant error rates” and said its engineers were “actively working” to resolve the issue.
By around 6 a.m. Eastern Time, Amazon reported that most affected services were showing signs of recovery. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered,” AWS said, noting that efforts toward a “full resolution” were ongoing.
AWS supports some of the largest businesses and organizations in the world, making its reliability critical to global online infrastructure.
“So much of the world now relies on just a few major cloud providers to power the internet,” said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at the UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “When one of them has a problem, the impact is widespread and immediate.”
Burgess added that the internet has effectively become a utility—akin to water or electricity—since so much of daily life depends on it. “When there’s a disruption, users rarely realize it’s AWS behind the scenes—they just see Snapchat or Roblox not working,” he said.
By 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time, Amazon confirmed that “most AWS service operations are succeeding normally again.”
