A significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage originating from its critical US-EAST-1 data center region in North Virginia caused widespread disruptions on Monday, knocking major websites, applications, and online services offline for thousands of users globally.
According to reports, the problems began early Monday morning, with users reporting issues accessing a vast array of popular platforms. According to the outage tracking website DownDetector, reports spiked for services including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and the AI search engine Perplexity.
Amazon’s own ecosystem was heavily affected, with users reporting problems with Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, and Ring doorbells. The disruption also hit financial and productivity tools, with Robinhood, Coinbase, Canva, and even the McDonald’s app experiencing connectivity issues.
Amazon confirmed the disruption on its official AWS status page, stating, “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The company added that it is “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”
The incident highlights the internet’s heavy reliance on a few major cloud providers. The US-EAST-1 region is one of Amazon’s largest and oldest, and issues there frequently have a significant cascading effect across the web.
Several companies publicly confirmed that AWS was the source of their problems. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” The official “Fortnite Status” account also posted that an “outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins.”
As of early afternoon, services remained intermittent for many users as AWS engineers continued to work on a resolution.
A partial list of affected services includes social platforms Snapchat, Signal, Gaming sites Roblox, Fortnite, Clash of Clans and Amazon services, including Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, and Ring
While many users felt the inconvenience of interrupted streaming or gaming, the outage served as a severe reminder of the financial stakes involved, especially for small businesses.
Ismael Wrixen, CEO of ThriveCart, noted that the impact goes far beyond consumer apps.
“Today’s outage isn’t just an ‘east coast AWS’ problem; it’s a reminder that 100% uptime is a myth for everyone,” Wrixen said in a statement. “The headlines will focus on streaming services being down. The real, untold story is the unrecoverable loss of conversions for millions of small businesses. Every minute this occurs, entrepreneurs are learning the most painful lesson in e-commerce: your perfectly optimized ad funnel means nothing if the ‘buy’ button is dead.”
Wrixen emphasized that the event exposes critical flaws in business continuity planning. “This is a harsh wake-up call about the critical need for multi-regional redundancy and intelligent architecture,” he added. “The platforms that are still able to process transactions today are the ones that were architected for this exact scenario… The ultimate security for an entrepreneur is a platform partner who is obsessed with conversion reliability.”
As of early afternoon, services remained intermittent for many users as AWS engineers continued to work on a resolution.
..developing story
Go to TECHTRENDSKE.co.ke for more tech and business news from the African continent.
Follow us on WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter to ensure you don’t miss out on any future updates. Send tips to editorial@techtrendsmedia.co.ke
