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A huge global AWS outage knocked popular websites and applications offline on Monday, leading billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to promote his messaging platform, X chat, as a secure and autonomous alternative.

The AWS outage that mainly hit the US-East-1 region in Virginia resulted in widespread service disruptions in various industries. Apps like Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Perplexity AI, Robinhood, Duolingo, and even Amazon's own services like Prime Video and Alexa were hit with connectivity issues, and millions of users were left frustrated. Outage tracking platform Downdetector logged close to 4 million user reports in the morning itself, which is double the usual 1.8 million daily complaints.

Elon Musk Highlights X Chat Stability

Amid the chaos, Elon Musk took to X to underscore the reliability of his platform. “The messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange AWS dependencies such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk tweeted. He also emphasized the platform’s capability for secure file transfers, audio, and video calls.

Musk’s brief update, “X works,” reinforced that his platform remained unaffected by the AWS disruption, drawing attention to its independence from large cloud service providers.

AWS Outage Impact: Gaming, Finance, AI and Beyond

The blackout had waves in several sectors. Online gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Rocket League, PlayStation Network, Pokémon Go, and Wordle went offline, impacting users in the US, UK, and other places. Financial institutions like Venmo, Chime, Lyft, and banks like Lloyds and Bank of Scotland similarly saw brief outages. Even the UK's HMRC tax portal was made inaccessible.

AI company Perplexity and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase affirmed that their services were affected. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas tweeted on X that the firm was busy resolving problems due to AWS. Messaging app Signal also admitted to short-term disruptions.

AWS Responds, Recovery Underway

Amazon Web Services made a statement confirming the issue, citing "higher error rates and latencies" on several of its services in its US-East-1 region. AWS engineers allegedly identified the problem in a key infrastructure zone and engaged several parallel recovery paths. By 10:39 a.m., AWS indicated "strong indications of recovery," writing that the majority of service requests were now succeeding. The company continued working through a stack of queued requests.

ALSO READ: Amazon Web Services Outage Triggers Widespread Internet Blackout: Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Roblox Go Down Globally

This blackout, the largest internet outage since the 2024 CrowdStrike failure, underscores AWS' dominant position in international cloud computing, supporting some one-third of the global cloud market.

International Users Express Frustration

On social media sites such as Reddit, customers reported severe trouble accessing threads, posting comments, and loading feeds. Although some of the services have resumed, such outages highlight the risks of depending too much on centralized cloud vendors.

ALSO READ: PlayStation Network Faces Major Outage; Thousands Report 'WS-11649-5' Error | Here's How You Can Fix

As the AWS infrastructure cools down, customers in gaming, finance, AI, and e-commerce industries are gradually coming back online. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s promotion of X chat as a secure, AWS-free platform signals growing competition in the messaging space.

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