Major websites including popular gaming, financial and social media platforms have been facing serious connectivity issues after Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed the issue in an update on its status page on Monday, after web users reported difficulties accessing websites.
“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” said the AWS status update.
In a subsequent update it said it had “identified a potential root cause for [the] error rates” and was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery”.
Major platforms including AI startup Perplexity, trading app Robinhood, messaging app Signal and crypto exchange Coinbase all said their issues were due to the AWS outage.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
AWS is one of the giant cloud computing service providers, competing with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services to offer on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies and institutions.
Issues with its servers can wreak havoc on the web, with so many companies relying on its infrastructure to function.
Downdetector, a site where web users report outages, carried a roll call of popular sites where users had experienced access difficulties amid the outage.
Names on the list included Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Wordle and more.
Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were also facing issues, according to the site.
The Reuters news agency reported that Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the US, while many UK bank customers were also reporting outages.
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