A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted access to some of the world’s most widely used apps and websites on Monday, including Snapchat, Canva, Coinbase and Amazon’s own platforms.
The disruption began early Monday in the United States and quickly spread worldwide, affecting gaming, banking and entertainment services. Outage tracker Downdetector reported thousands of complaints from users unable to access platforms such as Duolingo, Roblox, Ring, Prime Video, Fortnite, PlayStation, Vodafone and the UK’s tax authority website, HMRC.
AWS said it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” with 28 of its services affected. “Engineers are immediately engaged and actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause,” the company said in an update.
Coinbase confirmed users were unable to log in to their accounts, citing the AWS disruption. “We’re aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage,” the cryptocurrency exchange said on X, adding that “all funds are safe.”
Messaging app Signal and AI startup Perplexity also reported interruptions. “The root cause is an AWS issue,” Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas said. Signal’s chief Meredith Whittaker posted that the outage had affected some users and was “related to a major AWS outage.”
The outage caused knock-on effects in transport and retail systems, with reports of malfunctioning check-in kiosks at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
AWS, a division of Amazon that generated $108 billion in revenue last year, underpins much of the global internet infrastructure, powering thousands of websites and corporate systems. Disruptions in its cloud network can trigger cascading outages across multiple industries.
AWS later confirmed the outage was caused by an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” according to an update at 2:01 a.m. Pacific time. Shortly afterward, the company said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” and that “most requests should now be succeeding,” though engineers were still clearing a backlog of queued requests.
Downdetector reported that the outage affected a wide range of major platforms, including Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, McDonald’s app, The New York Times, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo and Verizon.
Canva said it was “experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva,” adding that “there is a major issue with our underlying cloud provider.”
The incident was the latest reminder of how centralised the global digital ecosystem has become. A similar crash in July 2024, triggered by a faulty CrowdStrike software update, grounded flights and halted business operations worldwide.
As of Monday afternoon, reports suggest that AWS engineers continued to monitor systems and restore full functionality. The company urged customers to check its Service Health Dashboard for the latest updates.
Arabian Business has contacted Amazon Web Services for comment but has not received a response at the time of publication.
This is a developing story.
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