Amazon Web Services Outage Cripples Apps and Websites Across the Internet
From Snapchat to Robinhood, major platforms go dark as the tech giant’s cloud infrastructure falters.

A sweeping outage at Amazon’s web hosting platform brought large swaths of the internet to a standstill, crippling everything from streaming platforms to smart home devices.
Amazon Web Services, which provides remote computing services to many governments, universities, and companies, first saw trouble just after 3 a.m. on Monday, when the service reported on its Health Dashboard that the company was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
Issues were reported on a wide array of apps and other services, including Snapchat, online broker Robinhood, crypto currency exchange Coinbase, the McDonald’s app, online gaming platforms for Roblox and Fortnite, and encrypted messaging app Signal.
Other platforms that were affected included Reddit, home monitoring company Ring, video conferencing platform Zoom, and Venmo, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Officials for AWS said a few hours later that they were “actively working” on recovery across most affected services and that they were working on a “full resolution,” according to the Associated Press, which was also affected by the outage.
Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said to the wire service that most of the world relies on only a few companies for online services.
“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big [cloud] compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum.”

