Amazon Web Services outage takes websites and apps offline

UPDATE: Hundreds of websites and applications temporarily offline across North America and Europe Monday morning following an outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Northern Virginia appeared to be functioning normally when the United States woke up.

Earlier today, Amazon services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Alexa experienced outages or slowdowns, alongside messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Snapchat as well as entertainment and gaming sites like IMDb, Disney+, Fortnite, Roblox and Wordle, among others.

In its last update at 7:29 a.m. PDT regarding the data center outage, AWS, which provides cloud services to thousands of businesses around the world, said the situation was improving but gave no reason for what caused the problem.

“We have confirmed that several AWS services have experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 region. We are seeing early signs of connectivity issues resuming and are continuing to investigate the root cause,” the message read.

As a backdrop, e-commerce experts said regaining connectivity was only part of the problem, warning that Monday morning’s outage would likely have longer-term consequences for businesses operating on the web.

“When AWS sneezes, half the Internet gets the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users but also trigger a domino effect on payment flows,” said Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of e-commerce service providers Chargebacks911 and Fi911.

“What I’m expecting now is an increase in ‘I never received my service’ or ‘I was charged twice’ complaints. Many of these won’t be fraud, just confusion. But confusion is the number one driver of chargebacks. If merchants sit idly and wait for disputes to come in, they will lose revenue needlessly.”

She urged online businesses to get a head start by conducting duplicate charge sweeps, sending proactive notifications to affected users and issuing prompt refunds to affected customers.

“The outage will end long before the conflicts. Any company that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind schedule. Downtime happens, but the silence and slow responses are what causes real damage.”

Ismael Wrixen, CEO of digital commerce platform ThriveCart, said the outage should serve as a wake-up call for all operators in the sector.

Today’s outage isn’t just an “East Coast AWS” issue; It reminds us that 100% uptime is a myth for everyone. The Internet runs on shared infrastructure. The real story is not just that AWS had a critical issue, but how many companies discovered that their platform partner had no plan to fix it, especially outside of US business hours. This is a stark wake-up call about the critical need for multi-region redundancy and intelligent architecture.

Previously at 1:50 a.m. PDT: Hundreds of online services were temporarily offline across North America and Europe on Monday morning amid suggestions the problem was linked to an outage at an Amazon Web Services data center in Northern Virginia.

Besides Amazon services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Alexa, many other websites and apps have also experienced issues, including Signal, Life360, Roblox, Zoom, Fortnight, IMDb, and Disney+, among others.

The issue appears to be linked to a serious outage at an AWS facility in Northern Virginia, but it remains to be confirmed whether this is the sole cause of broader issues, which have been reported in both North America and Europe.

AWS first reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” just after midnight PST, with its last message at 1:26 a.m. PST indicating that the issue persisted.

“We can confirm significant error rates for queries to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region,” the message read.

“This issue also affects other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region. During this time, customers may not be able to create or update support cases. Engineers were immediately involved and are actively working to both mitigate the issue and fully understand the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 a.m..”

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, was one of the first to point the finger at the AWS outage as the cause of the problem, with a post on X saying: “Perplexity is currently down. The root cause is an AWS issue. We are working to resolve it.”

The problem first started making news when people woke up in Europe to find that a number of websites and apps weren’t working.

Monitoring sites such as Downdetector began reporting increased issues across multiple sites and apps around 8am UK time (midnight PT).

Beyond entertainment and media sites, a number of banking sites have also been affected, including Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and Halifax in the UK, as well as cryptocurrency site Coinbase. The latter issued a statement affirming that all funds were safe.

The incident echoes an outage by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in July 2024, which affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide, disrupting airlines, banks and government services at an estimated global cost of $10 billion.

The exact cause of the outage has not yet been determined