Amazon's AWS outage disrupts Fortnite, Snapchat, Coinbase

AWS, Amazon’s cloud services unit, has been hit by a global outage on Monday on (October 20) resulting in connectivity problems several companies and severe disruptions for websites including Fortnite and Snapchat.

Affected platforms included Crunchyroll, Roblox, Whatnot, Rainbow Six Siege, Coinbase, Canva, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, The New York Times, Life360, Fortnite, Apple TV, Verizon, Chime, McDonald’s App, CollegeBoard, Wordle, and PUBG Battlegrounds, reported the Hindustan Times.

"We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” stated AWS in an update on its status page.

AWS outage hits Perplexity

The Amazon outage, has hit AI company Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange outfit Coinbase and trading app Robinhood.

"Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it," stated Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas in a post on X.

The disruptions in AWS services, which provides on-demand computing power along with data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals can cause outages in large numbers of websites and platforms that depend on cloud infrastructure, reported Reuters.

Also Read: Amazon plans major layoffs; 15 per cent of HR employees to be hit

PrimeVideo, Alexa services disrupted

According to Downdetector, Amazone’s e-commerce website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were also facing disruptions.

The outage tracking website further stated that Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were down, while Paypal's Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues.

According to media reports, Uber rival Lyft's app was also down for a large number of users in the US.

“PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by,” stated Messaging app Signal's President Meredith Whittaker in a post on X.

Also Read: Why ecommerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart are under govt probe

Amazon says AWS service recovery on track

However, Amazon said recoveries across most affected AWS services has been observed.

“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share,” stated a message on the AWS Health Dashboard.

“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda,” it added.