AWS outage brings half the internet down

New Delhi, Oct 20 Amazon Web Services is facing a major outage on Monday that has affected online services globally, including AI platforms, e-commerce platforms, popular websites and online games.

Access to Amazon's virtual assistant technology Alexa, the social media app Snapchat, online game Fortnite, the AI platform ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services was disrupted.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis.

Amazon reported that it is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” and that multiple services are “impacted” by operational issues.

Users on social media platform Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant is down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests.

AWS' cloud-hosted platforms such as Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonald’s app were also affected, according to user reports.

The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be restored.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas informed on social media platform X, "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it."

AWS outage knocks Amazon, ChatGPT, Alexa and dozens of apps offline

The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM Eastern Time (ET). “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said.

Later at 5:27 a.m. ET, Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery,” adding that "most requests should now be succeeding." We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests, it said.

AWS outages in the US-EAST-1 region had caused wide-spread disruptions in 2020, 2021, and 2023, leading to extended downtime for various sites and applications.

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