LONDON: Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered a major outage on Monday, disrupting a wide range of online services and apps worldwide — from gaming and financial platforms to messaging services.
The outage, which affected AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, caused connectivity problems for thousands of companies and popular online platforms including Fortnite, Snapchat, Roblox, Venmo, and Slack.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said on its service status page. “We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
The company did not immediately respond to a request for further comment, while Amazon.com also remained silent on the issue.
Apps and websites affected
According to outage tracking site Downdetector, Amazon’s main shopping site, Prime Video, and voice assistant Alexa were all affected.
Financial apps including PayPal’s Venmo and banking platform Chime also faced connectivity issues, while gaming platforms such as Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline.
User reports indicate problems with Amazon Prime Video since 3:13 AM EDT.
How is it affecting you? #AmazonPrimeVideoDownhttps://t.co/DecrQEZjVW— Downdetector (@downdetector) October 20, 2025
AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and trading app Robinhood were among companies confirming that their systems had been hit by the AWS disruption.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 20, 2025
Ride-hailing service Lyft also reported problems, with thousands of users in the United States unable to access its app.
Messaging platform Signal’s President, Meredith Whittaker, confirmed that the service was impacted by the outage as well.
PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.
— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) October 20, 2025
Impact beyond the United States
The disruption also extended to Britain, where major firms and services including Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the country’s tax authority HMRC reported connectivity problems, according to Downdetector’s UK site.
Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, noted that his site continued to operate normally, posting simply: “X works.”
Reminder of the internet’s fragility
The outage marked the most significant internet disruption since the global CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024, which crippled IT systems across hospitals, airports, and banks.
AWS, which provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and cloud services to governments, companies, and individuals, is one of the world’s largest cloud providers, competing with Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.
The incident reignited debate over global dependence on a handful of technology giants to keep the internet running.
Humour in the midst of chaos
As businesses scrambled to restore operations, users online turned the outage into a moment of collective humour.
“AWS down” trended globally on X and Reddit, with social media feeds filling up with memes comparing the situation to a “digital apocalypse.”
The employee at Amazon web services trying to fix the servers pic.twitter.com/ghy01W2eh1
— Honest Curry Fan (@cookdbycurgoat) October 20, 2025
Many users joked about the collapse of productivity and imagined engineers “trying to restart the cloud,” while others celebrated the rare moment of enforced offline time.
Amazon Web Services right now pic.twitter.com/xl5rj8uvh1
— Zach Hardcastle (@hardcastlewx) October 20, 2025
By the time AWS began restoring services, the internet’s sense of humour had fully taken over. One viral post quipped that the engineers behind the fix “deserve a national holiday.”
And this is why everyone using the same damn Amazon web services is a great idea pic.twitter.com/GN3O43hLwu
— MetálicoJesús (@MetalicoJesus) October 20, 2025
The incident underscored both the fragility of global internet infrastructure and the resilience of its users — who, once again, managed to laugh through the outage that briefly brought the digital world to its knees.
twitter being the only reliable platform for when other apps go down. cause why tf snapchat DOWN pic.twitter.com/dqACChjoNQ
— ☺︎ (@NASTYYUGH) October 20, 2025
Everyone Running To Twitter After Amazon web services go down🏃🏽♂️ #outage pic.twitter.com/K4a0Qn0ipd
— Jonathan (@jonathan_x34) October 20, 2025
Amazon Web Services employees trying to keep the servers from failing again: pic.twitter.com/Lz6UUPNHWz
— SteelRobot 🥝 🇳🇿 🍉 (@SteelRobot06) October 20, 2025
