Amazon Cloud Outage Crashes Snapchat and Major Banks’ Services Around the World
Major institutions in the US and UK as well as international services like Fortnite, Roblox, and Snapchat were affected by Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage.
AWS, the company’s cloud computing division that powers a significant amount of the internet, experienced an outage Monday that knocked down a number of popular apps and online services worldwide.
Several UK institutions, including Lloyds Bank and the Bank of Scotland, as well as websites like Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Signal, Coinbase, and Robinhood were impacted by the outage. Service disruptions also affected the UK’s tax and customs department, HMRC, and telecom companies Vodafone and BT.
Many services were suffering higher “error rates and latencies,” according to AWS, which also stated that “we are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
It is the first significant worldwide internet outage since CrowdStrike’s failure last year, which rendered technological systems in banks, hospitals, and airports inoperable.
CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X that the AI startup Perplexity was down at the moment, confirming the problem. An AWS problem is the main culprit. We are trying to find a solution.
Alongside payment systems like PayPal’s Venmo and Chime, well-known gaming sites like Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans were also negatively impacted.
According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, connectivity issues also affected Alexa, Prime Video, and Amazon’s retail website.
Lyft, a competitor of Uber, lost thousands of users in the US, while telecom companies and banking institutions were among those impacted in the UK.
Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, said on X that the AWS outage also affected the company’s messaging technology.
Amazon did not reply to any requests for comment, while AWS referred reporters to its service status page when contacted.
Elon Musk claimed that his social media platform was unscathed by the broad outage, publishing only the message, “X works.”
