Amazon, Alexa, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and more go offline
A widespread outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) took down numerous online services early this morning, affecting users across the globe. The incident hit platforms including Amazon, Alexa, Fortnite, Snapchat, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Canva, and Perplexity. While some services such as Fortnite and Epic Games Store have reported full recovery, others continue to experience connectivity issues.
The disruption began at 3:11 AM ET and was linked to Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, a critical hub in AWS’s global infrastructure. According to Amazon’s latest update, the root cause was “an internal issue within the EC2 network,” specifically affecting DNS resolution and network load balancer monitoring. The company said the DNS issue has now been mitigated, and connectivity is gradually being restored.
Technical failure caused by internal network issue
In an update at 12:13 PM ET, Amazon reported progress: “We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services.” Efforts are also underway to resolve EC2 instance throttling, a limitation affecting the launch of new virtual machines.
The outage triggered functionality failures in numerous everyday services. Reddit users reported Alexa failing to respond to voice commands and interruptions in Amazon Ring security camera recordings. Some Echo Dot users noted their alarms didn’t go off due to the device failing to connect online, further highlighting the level of disruption caused.
Historic AWS instability in US-EAST-1 region
This isn’t the first time AWS has experienced large-scale outages centered around the US-EAST-1 region. Previous incidents in 2020, 2021, and 2023 created similar global disruptions, taking down major websites, platforms, and applications for hours.
This latest failure impacted dozens of cloud-reliant services such as Perplexity AI, Airtable, Zapier, Canva, and even the McDonald’s mobile app. Given the massive dependency many digital businesses have on AWS infrastructure, the outage underscores the risk of centralization in the global cloud computing ecosystem.
Cloud reliability in the spotlight again
Amazon said it will provide a full update by 10:00 AM PDT. For now, recovery is ongoing, and users are advised to monitor the AWS status dashboard for real-time updates. The incident serves as another reminder of the crucial role cloud infrastructure plays in modern digital life, and how its failure can ripple across industries in minutes.
