Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was hit by an hours-long outage on Monday, which took several prominent apps and websites down, including Fortnite and Snapchat, and caused connectivity issues for many companies around the world.
The maintenance site for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it took some three hours for engineers to largely fix the problem, which they first noticed when "increased error rates" hit multiple services.
By 10:35 a.m. GMT, the issue had been corrected, "and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now," it said. Some services, though, continued to be disrupted.
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.
During the outage, many other online services were affected, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors internet problems. They included Reddit, various video streaming platforms such as Hulu and Disney+, as well as messaging app Signal and Delta Air Lines.
In Europe, several major mobile phone operators, some U.K. banks, WhatsApp and Tinder were also affected. Services such as Amazon Prime, Perplexity, Alexa, and Duolingo were also reported as impacted.
AWS said the problem appeared to originate in a critical AWS infrastructure zone, the U.S.-East-1 region, located in the northern part of the U.S. state of Virginia.
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.
The outage showed "how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted," said financial analyst Michael Hewson.
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.
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.
Britain's Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to DownDetector's U.K. website. The country's tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website was hit by the outage as well.
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.
