A widespread AWS outage has plunged a significant portion of the internet into darkness, taking down millions of websites and major online services. Among the high-profile casualties are Amazon.com itself, PrimeVideo, the generative AI platform Perplexity, and the popular design tool Canva. The disruption began about 30 minutes ago, and its impact is being felt globally, with users in the United States and Europe reporting service failures. The sudden and massive scale of the failure underscores the critical reliance of the modern digital world on a few key cloud infrastructure providers.
Amazon has acknowledged the serious disruption via its AWS Health page, confirming its engineers are actively engaged in mitigation efforts. “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the company noted. This widespread issue is so severe it is even affecting the internal mechanisms for seeking help, with AWS adding that the problem “may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API.” The statement concluded with a commitment to both understanding the root cause and restoring full functionality as quickly as possible.
The cascading effects of the outage have been confirmed by numerous platform owners. Epic Games’ Fortnite confirmed a major service disruption on X, clarifying that while gameplay is not affected, players are unable to log in because that service is powered by AWS. Likewise, Perplexity confirmed its chat application is offline, and Canva acknowledged a service outage impacting core features like image editing. On its status page, the graphic design company stated, “We are currently experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva,” further underscoring the severity of the infrastructure failure.
The list of affected services extends well beyond the initial reports. According to Downdetector, at least 15 major platforms, including entertainment giants like Roblox and Hulu, are offline or experiencing severe issues due to the AWS failure. Other notable services experiencing a total or partial shutdown include social media platform Snapchat, gaming apps like Clash of Clans and Palworld, and the brokerage app Robinhood. The widespread failure demonstrates how a single point of failure in a core cloud region can paralyze a diverse array of businesses and consumer services simultaneously.
This is a developing story, though some services are beginning to show early signs of recovery, with minor improvements reported about 45 minutes after the initial start of the outage. As engineers race to fully restore service, the incident serves as a stark reminder of the fragile interconnectedness of the modern internet.
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