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A significant disruption within Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud computing provider, has triggered a widespread internet outage, affecting dozens of major consumer apps, online games, banking services, and smart home devices.
The incident is concentrated in AWS’s crucial US-EAST-1 region in North Virginia, a key internet hub, with engineers actively working to resolve the "operational issue" which began early this morning.
The Scale of Impact
The outage has caused increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services, with Amazon DynamoDB (a core NoSQL database service) listed as experiencing significant error rates. This disruption has cascaded across the digital world, affecting:
- Gaming: Fortnite and Roblox confirmed log-in and service issues, with Fortnite stating the problem was tied to the broader internet outage.
- Social & Communication: Snapchat, Perplexity AI, and Duolingo users reported widespread issues.
- Banking: Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland (all part of Lloyds Banking Group) saw a surge in reports of difficulties logging into accounts.
- Smart Devices & E-commerce: Amazon's own ecosystem has been hit, with users reporting problems with Ring doorbells (owned by Amazon) and Amazon Alexa devices, with some receiving a "Sorry, the internet isn't reachable" message. Amazon.com, Prime Video, and the McDonald's App were also reported as having issues.
- Other Platforms: The full list of affected services is extensive, with reports also impacting Coinbase, Canva, Robinhood, The New York Times, and numerous other platforms that rely on the AWS backbone for operations.
Cisco’s Thousand Eyes service, which tracks internet outages, reported a massive surge in problems, heavily concentrated at the Virginia location of the impacted AWS region.
AWS Response and Recovery Time
AWS engineers were "immediately engaged" to mitigate the issue and understand the root cause. The company confirmed the problem affects their ability to create or update support cases.
Previous major outages in the US-EAST-1 region have sometimes lasted for several hours, with a 2024 Kinesis outage lasting nearly seven hours and a 2021 EBS outage causing cascading failures over an eight-hour period. While AWS has committed to providing continuous updates, the widespread and critical nature of this disruption underscores the immense challenge in guaranteeing uninterrupted service when a single, vital cloud region suffers an internal failure.
The event is a potent reminder of the fragility and single point of failure risk inherent in the modern internet's heavy reliance on a few dominant cloud providers. Service is not expected to return to complete normality until the engineers fully resolve the core 'operational issue' in North Virginia.
