A massive outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has disrupted numerous popular apps and websites worldwide this morning, including Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, Canva, Fortnite, and online banking platforms of several major financial institutions. This is reported by Baltimore Chronicle with reference to BBC.
According to the monitoring platform Downdetector, owned by Ookla, more than four million reports of service issues were submitted globally in just the first few hours of the outage—more than double the usual daily reports. Problems began around 06:56 UTC (02:56 AM EDT), primarily affecting the US East 1 region, a key AWS data center. By 09:50 BST, over 500 companies across 66 countries reported disruptions. In the United Kingdom alone, more than 400,000 issues were logged within two hours of the outage.
The affected services include video call platforms like Zoom, fitness apps such as MyFitnessPal, tools like Coinbase, Slack, Smartsheet, and gaming services including Epic Games, PlayStation Network, PokemonGo, and Rocket League. The website of the UK tax authority HMRC and the smart Ring doorbell app were also impacted, with users encountering the message “Failed to connect” when trying to access live feeds.
Customers of major banks, including Lloyds, Halifax, and the Bank of Scotland, reported problems as well. Some users were unable to log into mobile banking apps or complete online payments. Social media posts indicated some card transactions were declined, though BBC could not independently verify these reports.
Amazon Web Services stated that a potential cause of elevated error rates for DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 region had been identified. Engineers are working “on multiple parallel paths” to restore services as quickly as possible.
Despite the wide impact, not all platforms were affected. Tech giants like Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), and X (formerly Twitter) reported that their services were operating normally. Experts note that not all companies rely on AWS, and some maintain backup systems or alternative cloud providers.
While outages of this scale are uncommon, experts say such incidents are becoming more frequent, as many digital services rely on a single provider like AWS, which powers millions of websites and apps globally.
Earlier we wrote that Windows 11 Copilot Update: Voice Commands, Copilot Actions, and Gaming Copilot for Xbox.
