Global AWS Outage Disrupts Major Websites and Apps Including Fortnite, Snapchat, and Lyft

Lyft, a competitor to Uber, experienced widespread outages affecting thousands of users across the United States.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure division of Amazon, suffered a significant outage on Monday that triggered connectivity problems for numerous organizations globally and interrupted services for popular platforms including Fortnite and Snapchat.

AWS acknowledged the issue in an update on their status dashboard, stating: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Several tech companies publicly attributed their service disruptions to the AWS outage, including AI company Perplexity, cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, and financial trading application Robinhood.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X: "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it."

AWS provides cloud computing resources, storage solutions, and various digital services to businesses, government entities, and individuals. When its infrastructure experiences problems, it can cause cascading outages across websites and applications that depend on its cloud services. AWS competes in the cloud market alongside Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Neither AWS nor Amazon responded to requests for comment regarding the situation.

According to outage monitoring site Downdetector, Amazon's main shopping platform, PrimeVideo streaming service, and Alexa virtual assistant were all experiencing disruptions.

The gaming sector was particularly affected, with popular titles such as Epic Games' Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans all reporting downtime. Financial services including PayPal's Venmo and digital banking platform Chime also faced service interruptions, as reported by Downdetector.

The ride-sharing service Lyft reported that thousands of its users throughout the United States were unable to access the application.

Signal messaging app President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was impacted by the AWS service disruption.