Major AWS outage destroys Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat and more

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has caused online services including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortniteand more. The AWS Health Checker reports that several services are “impacted” by operational issues and that the company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region” – although the outages are also impacting services in other regions around the world.

Reddit users are reporting that the Alexa smart assistant is broken and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and in my own experience I’ve found that routines like preset alarms don’t work. The AWS issue also appears to impact platforms running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva and the McDonalds app. The cause of the outage has not been confirmed and it is unclear when regular service will be restored.

“Perplexity is currently down,” Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, told X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We are working to resolve it.”

The AWS Dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 region at 3:11 a.m. ET. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said in an update posted at 3:51 a.m. ET.