An AWS outage in the US‑EAST‑1 region knocked major websites and apps offline early Monday. Millions of users reported login failures, frozen content, and smart devices going quiet. AWS, which is Amazon, says teams are investigating and mitigating the issue.
What happened
The incident began around 3:11 AM ET, when AWS reported increased error rates and latencies in US‑EAST‑1. At 3:51 AM ET, AWS engineers announced they were actively working to fix the issue and identify its root cause.
Services hit
Many popular services that rely on AWS were affected, including:
- Amazon.com and Prime Video
- Canva and Perplexity
- Snapchat, Fortnite (login), Roblox, Duolingo
- Alexa, Ring, Airtable, Coinbase
Multiple sites showed outage spikes on monitoring platforms.
What companies said
Perplexity’s CEO confirmed their platform was down and pointed to an AWS issue. Canva posted that they were seeing “significantly increased error rates.” AWS acknowledged the issue may also impact customer support requests.
How this spread across the internet
Downdetector and real-time trackers showed major spikes across dozens of platforms. The outage impacted payment apps, gaming platforms, smart home devices, and productivity tools—highlighting how deeply AWS infrastructure runs through the internet.
What to do if you’re affected
- Retry logins after a few minutes
- Check official status pages for your apps
- Use backup platforms for mission-critical tasks
- Monitor the AWS Service Health Dashboard for real-time updates
Background: Why AWS matters
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud platform in the world, powering everything from entertainment and finance to retail and logistics. A failure in a major AWS region—like US‑EAST‑1—can create ripple effects across industries and continents.
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