Amazon Web Services Outage Sends Shockwaves Across the Internet
The internet is buckling today as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud infrastructure provider, experiences a massive, ongoing outage affecting platforms across the globe.
From Snapchat, Fortnite, and Robinhood to Canva, Framer, Asana, Venmo, and even Amazon’s own retail systems, users are reporting error messages, timeouts, and frozen screens as AWS engineers race to restore normal service.
Reports began surfacing early Monday morning as developers and end users flooded forums like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) with screenshots of failed connections. AWS has confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple core services in its US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, one of the internet’s most critical data hubs.
“We are actively engaged and working to mitigate the issue and understand the root cause,” AWS said in a brief status update.
The outage has caused widespread disruption to cloud-hosted systems that power finance, gaming, e-commerce, and digital media. According to Downdetector, reports of failures surged across the US, UK, Brazil, and Australia within minutes of the incident.
Why It Matters
AWS underpins much of the world’s online infrastructure — from APIs and databases to payment systems and logistics. When one region goes down, millions of apps feel the impact. The Northern Virginia region is especially critical, serving as the backbone for global authentication and content delivery systems.
A Global Chain Reaction
Though AWS operates dozens of data center regions worldwide, many organizations rely heavily on US-EAST-1 for primary operations. When it fails, the internet stutters. Tonight, users around the world are seeing that reality firsthand.
- Sydney: Canva, Alexa, and Venmo down.
- New York: Amazon checkout failing.
- London: Gaming servers offline.
- São Paulo: Marketplace transactions stalled.
The Broader Lesson
The event underscores how deeply centralized the modern internet has become, and how a single point of failure can ripple across industries. While AWS works on a fix, businesses are being reminded that redundancy and failover aren’t luxuries; they’re necessities.
The company says mitigation efforts are underway, though no timeline for full recovery has been given.
For now, much of the world remains in digital limbo, a cloud under thunder.
