Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a widespread outage Monday morning, disrupting access to major apps and websites including Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, and several government portals. The interruption left millions of users offline before Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery” by the afternoon.
The outages affected AWS, Alexa, and other related services across the U.S. and U.K. In a statement, AWS said its engineers were “immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issues, and fully understanding the root cause.”
The disruption originated in AWS’s US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, one of the company’s most heavily trafficked data hubs. Early reports suggest a DNS problem, which acts as the internet’s “phone book” by linking web addresses to the correct IPs. The issue briefly disrupted DynamoDB, AWS’s data storage system, triggering service interruptions across platforms ranging from gaming to banking apps, according to Tom’s Guide.
At the peak of the outage around 7:50 a.m., reports on Downdetector surged to nearly 50,000, with users struggling to access Amazon’s mobile app, Alexa, and services including Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Pokémon GO, and various banking portals, according to Tom’s Guide. In the U.K., the disruption also affected government websites and entertainment platforms. AWS cautioned that “some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”
AWS delivers a wide range of cloud computing services to users across the globe, including individuals, universities, governments, and businesses. Its offerings span servers, data storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile app development, and cybersecurity solutions.
Meanwhile, AWS issued a statement, saying, “we can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”
By Monday afternoon, AWS reported “significant signs of recovery” as engineers implemented multiple fixes at once, according to The New York Times. Outage reports on the AWS Downdetector were also dropping rapidly.
Amazon noted that “the severity of the incident has been degraded,” indicating that while most services were returning to normal, some users might still experience minor delays.
READ: Amazon to pay $2.5 billion settlement over misleading Prime sign-ups, FTC says (
Reflecting on the outage, Amazon advised users to “continue to retry any failed requests” and promised updates “as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.” While the majority of systems now appear stable, engineers are continuing to monitor performance to prevent additional disruptions, according to Tom’s Guide.
Amazon Web Services added that the incident’s seriousness has “degraded,” but cautioned that some users may still experience delays as remaining issues are resolved.
AWS’s dominant role in global cloud infrastructure means that even a single outage can have widespread effects across industries, including streaming, gaming, finance, and e-commerce. Monday’s disruption highlighted the growing interdependence of online services on a handful of major cloud providers.
Full list of affected sites and apps, as reported by The Economic Times:
Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, Roblox, Robinhood, Snapchat, Perplexity AI, Venmo, Canvas by Instructure, Crunchyroll, Whatnot, Rainbow Six Siege, Coinbase, Canva, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, The New York Times, Life360, Fortnite, Apple TV, Verizon, Chime, McDonald’s App, CollegeBoard, Wordle, and PUBG.