Dozens of popular apps and online games crashed overnight between Sunday and Monday due to a global outage affecting Amazon's cloud infrastructure. The disruption, which began around 10 a.m. Israel time, impacted millions of users worldwide attempting to access various services, from messaging platforms to gaming apps.
Among the affected platforms were Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, Ring, the New York Times' Wordle game, and even the website of the UK tax authority. According to DownDetector, which monitors online service disruptions, more than 3,000 Snapchat users and over 1,000 Roblox players reported issues accessing the platforms.
The root of the problem lay in Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech giant's cloud computing arm, which provides digital infrastructure to hundreds of thousands of companies and services globally. AWS allows businesses to rent storage space and computing power without investing in physical servers or their own data centers, a model that has become a cornerstone of the modern internet.
Amazon confirmed the issue on its official service status page, stating it was experiencing elevated error rates and delays across multiple AWS services. The company said the disruption was centered at its facilities in Northern Virginia, US, and primarily affected two core services: Amazon DynamoDB, a managed cloud database, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows businesses to rent virtual processing power.
AWS controls roughly one-third of the global cloud services market, meaning any disruption in its operations can affect a wide range of apps and websites that rely on its infrastructure. Similar outages have occurred in recent years, each time causing major disruptions to digital services worldwide.
Most of the complaints on DownDetector focused on server connection issues (58% of reports), but access to websites and the ability to play games were also affected. As of now, it is unclear when services will be fully restored, and Amazon has not provided an estimated time for resolving the issue.
