Massive AWS outage hits Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite

A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted several leading online platforms for nearly four hours early Monday, knocking major services like Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Canva, and Epic Games Store offline.

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By 6:35 AM ET, AWS reported that “most service operations are succeeding normally”, with several affected platforms—including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity—confirming full recovery.

However, by 9:50 AM ET, Amazon noted that some systems in its US-EAST-1 region remained impacted, with engineers working toward complete restoration.

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The outage was first detected around 3:11 AM ET, initially affecting US servers but quickly spreading to global networks. The company has yet to confirm the exact cause.

Users across Reddit and X reported issues with Alexa smart assistants, including unresponsive commands and malfunctioning routines.

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Other services, such as Airtable, McDonald’s app, and Canva, also suffered downtime due to their reliance on AWS’s cloud infrastructure.

This latest disruption adds to a growing list of AWS-related outages—in 2020, 2021, and 2023—that have underscored the internet’s dependence on Amazon’s cloud backbone and the ripple effects of its failures.