Massive Outage Hits Amazon Servers, Disrupting Global Internet Services
A major technical outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of tech giant Amazon, caused widespread internet disruptions on Monday morning, taking down dozens of popular websites and apps around the world — including Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Zoom, and Fortnite, as well as several banking platforms and government websites across Europe and the United States.
According to AWS’s official status page, the company reported “elevated error rates and significant response delays” across multiple services within its US-EAST-1 region, based in Northern Virginia, one of the company’s most critical data hubs that supports the backbone infrastructure of many global technology, financial, and entertainment platforms.
> “Upon detecting the issue, our engineers immediately began working intensively to contain it and identify its root cause,” AWS said in a statement, adding that it is “progressively restoring affected services” and will continue providing updates every 45 minutes.
The company emphasized that its technical teams are “fully engaged in ensuring stability and preventing recurrence,” as some services gradually return online. However, no official declaration of full recovery has been issued yet.
Widespread Global Impact
Outage-tracking platform Downdetector reported over 5,000 complaints from Snapchat users alone, while similar disruptions were logged for Zoom, Canva, Wordle, Signal, Slack, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Peloton, and Rocket League.
In the UK, customers of Halifax, Lloyds Bank, and Bank of Scotland experienced issues accessing their accounts or completing online transactions. The British tax authority (HMRC) website also went offline, displaying service unavailability messages to users attempting to log in.
As the world’s largest cloud infrastructure provider, AWS powers a massive share of the modern internet, offering computing, storage, database, AI, and analytics solutions that many organizations rely on daily. This dominance made Monday’s outage particularly disruptive, underscoring how deeply embedded AWS has become in the global digital ecosystem.
Reports also indicated intermittent problems with major telecom networks such as Vodafone, and streaming platforms including Prime Video and Ring, both of which operate on AWS infrastructure.
Industry Reactions
Aravind Srinivas, CEO and founder of Perplexity, confirmed that the disruption stemmed from a technical failure in AWS servers. Meanwhile, Elon Musk posted that his social media platform X remained “fully operational,” drawing a sharp contrast with the widespread downtime experienced elsewhere.
The incident is being compared to the CrowdStrike software crash last year, which caused millions of Windows systems to fail worldwide following a faulty update — leading to mass flight cancellations and major IT disruptions across UK healthcare services.
As AWS engineers continue restoration efforts, the outage serves as a stark reminder of the fragile interconnectedness of global digital infrastructure — and how a single point of failure can ripple through the world’s online ecosystem within minutes.