A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has caused significant disruptions across many of the world’s most popular apps, websites, and online services from social media platforms like Snapchat to government websites such as the UK’s HMRC.
The issue, which began around midnight Pacific time (10 a.m. Beirut Time) on Monday, October 20, is linked to a major operational failure at AWS’s US-EAST-1 data center in Northern Virginia one of its most critical cloud computing hubs. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon and provides the cloud infrastructure behind a vast portion of the modern internet.
What’s Happening?
In a statement on its official status page, AWS confirmed "increased error rates and latencies" affecting multiple services. Engineers are actively working on mitigation while trying to pinpoint the exact root cause of the failure.
Among the affected services are core AWS offerings such as:
Amazon DynamoDB (a NoSQL database)
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (virtual servers powering apps and websites)
This disruption has had ripple effects across platforms that depend on AWS for backend infrastructure.
What Apps and Services Are Down?
User reports have flooded Downdetector, a platform that tracks service outages. The list of impacted services includes:Snapchat, Roblox, Zoom, Duolingo, Canva, Clash Royale, Fortnite, Slack,PlayStation, NetworkSignal among others.
Global Impact
Although the core issue appears confined to AWS’s Virginia-based data center, the effects are being felt globally. That’s because AWS serves as the underlying infrastructure for millions of websites and applications, even those with no obvious connection to Amazon.
AWS is currently the world’s largest cloud services provider, outpacing competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. In 2024 alone, AWS generated over $100 billion in revenue, accounting for the majority of Amazon’s profits.
What Is AWS and Why Does It Matter?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform launched in 2006 that provides scalable computing resources including storage, networking, and data processing to businesses on demand.
Rather than build and maintain their own physical servers, companies can rent access to AWS infrastructure, allowing for flexibility and massive cost savings. This model has made AWS the backbone of countless modern services.
When AWS goes down, the effect is widespread and immediate, as many platforms rely on it for everything from data storage to real-time processing and customer logins.
What’s Next?
As of publication, AWS is still investigating the exact cause of the issue. While some services may have started recovering intermittently, others remain partially or fully inaccessible.
There has been no confirmed timeline for a full resolution.
Comments