Major Global Outage at Amazon Web Services Disrupts Hundreds of Platforms Worldwide

On Monday, a significant service disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) sparked widespread outages across dozens of the internet’s most-used sites and apps, exposing the scale of modern digital infrastructure’s interdependence. 

What Happened

AWS — which powers a large portion of the internet’s server infrastructure — reported “increased error rates” across many services, with its engineers already working to restore normal operations. According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, more than 2,000 incident reports were logged in the United States alone, with users flagging widespread access problems across websites, mobile apps and streaming platforms.

Who Was Affected

The outage did not spare AWS’s own ecosystem: Amazon’s retail site, Prime Video and Alexa are among those reported to have been hit.
Beyond Amazon, a wide range of major platforms and services experienced disruptions, including:

• Social media & communication: Snapchat, Discord, WhatsApp

• Gaming & entertainment: Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, PUBG Battlegrounds, Twitch, Crunchyroll

• Productivity & education: Canva, Canvas by Instructure, Duolingo, Wordle

• Finance & tech: Robinhood, Venmo, Coinbase, Perplexity AI

• Media & government: The New York Times, UK tax‐authority HMRC, national telecoms and many others. 

(That’s just a sample — the full list includes many more digital services globally.)

Why It Matters

AWS is estimated to control about one-third of the global cloud infrastructure market.  As such, a breakdown within its service can ripple out to impact countless dependent platforms — from global banking to local apps. The incident highlights how modern digital experiences often rely on a small number of infrastructure providers.

One notable example: Perplexity’s CEO confirmed that the AWS issue was the root cause of their service disruption.

What’s Next & What You Should Do

• What’s being done: AWS engineers were already diagnosing the issue and working on restoring full service. As of the latest update, some platforms have begun recovery, though some users continue to report intermittent problems. 

• For users: If you experienced service downtime — whether on streaming, gaming, e-learning or finance apps — chances are it was due to this AWS disruption rather than an issue with your device or local network.

• For organizations: The outage serves as a reminder of the risks of over-reliance on a single cloud provider. Companies may want to review their infrastructure-resilience plans and consider multi-cloud or hybrid strategies.

• For developers: Monitoring how downstream services behave when a major provider falters can provide useful insights into dependency management, fallback architecture and user-communication strategies.

Final Thought

In our interconnected digital age, infrastructure faults at a single provider can quickly turn into global events. Monday’s AWS outage didn’t just affect one platform — it sent ripples across social media, gaming, finance, education and beyond. Keeping a resilient, diversified infrastructure and being prepared for such outages has never been more important.