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A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) early Monday caused massive internet disruptions across the United States and beyond, taking down popular platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Roblox, Canva, and even Amazon.com itself.

Thousands of users began reporting problems shortly after 3:00 a.m. ET, according to tracking website Downdetector, which recorded more than 5,800 outage reports for AWS by 3:44 a.m. ET. The majority of the issues were traced to the US-East-1 region, one of Amazon’s main cloud infrastructure hubs, followed by the US-West-1 and US-West-2 regions.

Services Across The Internet Affected

The outage didn’t just impact Amazon’s e-commerce platform; it rippled across the web, affecting mobile apps, cloud-based services, and smart home systems. Over 14,000 users reported problems with Amazon.com, including errors while accessing the mobile app (53 per cent), homepage (26 per cent), and shopping cart (22 per cent).

The company’s streaming and voice assistant platforms, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, leaving users unable to watch shows or control connected devices. Several users reported that Alexa routines, alarms, and smart home commands were unresponsive.

On its official AWS status page, Amazon acknowledged the disruption, stating, “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause.” The impact extended to several tech firms reliant on AWS cloud infrastructure. Perplexity AI’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, confirmed on X, “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” Other affected services reportedly included Airtable, Canva, Robinhood, Venmo, and even the McDonald’s app.

User Reactions Flood Social Media

As platforms went offline, frustrated users took to X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit to share their experiences. One user wrote, “Wow, AWS went down and took half the internet with it.” Another joked, “Even Amazon.com is down. I don’t recall that happening in past AWS outages. This must be a big one.”

Many gamers expressed panic as Fortnite, Roblox, and Snapchat went offline, with one user lamenting, “Why is Snapchat and everything else down? I can’t lose my snap streaks!”Others pointed out real-world consequences; delivery drivers using Amazon Relay and Flex faced login issues, while students using online platforms such as Canvas were unable to access coursework.

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According to AWS’s latest update, engineers are continuing to investigate the issue and restore functionality. The company said it would provide further updates “within 45 minutes or sooner” as mitigation efforts progress.

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Amazon Web Services, which powers thousands of global applications through its cloud computing, data storage, and networking solutions, is a critical backbone for the internet. Outages of this scale often disrupt a wide range of consumer and enterprise services simultaneously.While Amazon has not disclosed the exact cause of the failure, early reports indicate a networking or infrastructure fault in the US-East-1 region, one of its largest data centers located in Northern Virginia.

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