New Delhi: A massive outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted major websites and apps across the world, bringing sections of the internet to a standstill. From Amazon’s own platforms to banking, gaming and AI services, users faced widespread disruptions for several hours.
According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, thousands of users in the United States reported problems accessing websites dependent on AWS servers. The fault, which began early Monday, affected cloud-based applications, streaming platforms, financial services and gaming networks.
Amazon acknowledged the issue and said its engineers were investigating the cause. While some services began to recover later in the day, several platforms continued to experience intermittent problems.
Among the affected were leading platforms such as Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, Robinhood, Venmo, Snapchat, Perplexity AI, Canva, Duolingo, Roblox, Crunchyroll, PUBG Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, Apple TV, Ring, Goodreads, Life360, Chime, McDonald’s app, CollegeBoard, The New York Times, and Wordle.
Reports said the AWS outage also hit several business and educational services, including cloud-hosted tools used by developers and universities. The disruption, which appeared to originate from AWS’s US-East-1 region, caused cascading failures across dependent systems worldwide.
AWS powers a significant portion of the global digital infrastructure, providing storage, computing and hosting services to millions of organisations. Outages in its systems often have a ripple effect across sectors ranging from e-commerce and finance to media and education.
While Amazon has not specified the cause, experts said the scale of the impact highlighted the world’s growing reliance on a few major cloud service providers. Even a temporary glitch, they warned, can cripple large parts of the internet.
As of late Monday, partial restoration had been reported for several services, though AWS was yet to declare full recovery. The company said it was conducting a detailed analysis to prevent a recurrence of the disruption.
