Many websites and online services are affected, primarily in the United States. Among the impacted platforms are Alexa, Snapchat, and the video game Fortnite. The situation appears to be returning to normal by midday on October 20th.
Amazon reported, this Monday, October 20th, an outage affecting its cloud computing division, AWS. “We are confirming increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region,” which is infrastructure located in the northern US state of Virginia, the company stated.
The first slowdowns were observed around 7:11 UTC, and by 9:27 UTC, AWS indicated it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” after having “applied initial mitigation measures.” The situation had largely returned to normal by midday.
Widespread Disruptions
This outage caused disruptions to many popular websites and applications like Snapchat, Alexa, and Robinhood, an American financial services company. The artificial intelligence startup Perplexity and the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase also reported being affected.
In the United Kingdom, a Lloyds Bank spokesperson stated that some of its services were impacted “by issues related to Amazon Web Services.”
Many online video games also experienced outages, such as those from Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans, as did the mobile payment services Venmo, owned by PayPal, and Chime.
The messaging app Signal confirmed that its platform was affected by the AWS outage. Finally, several telecommunications operators were impacted, including Orange, Bouygues Telecom, and SFR.
AWS operates large data centers located in different parts of the world that provide computing power, data storage, and other digital services to businesses, public administrations, and individuals. This outage highlights the risks associated with heavy reliance on foreign cloud service providers.