Amazon Web Services, the backbone of much of the modern digital economy, suffered a widespread outage centered in its U.S. East region. The disruption brought down major websites, applications and systems across the world. From airlines to banks to social platforms, the effect was immediate and far reaching.
The incident, first flagged around 3 a.m. ET in the US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, caused users from across the globe to lose access to platforms such as Fortnite, Snapchat, Signal, and Alexa, and impacted services at major firms including Coinbase and Perplexity AI.
AWS said it was working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery” after engineers identified the disruption originated in its infrastructure in the northern Virginia hub. While the company reported that “most service operations are succeeding normally now,” some customers still faced delays as mitigations continued.
The event underscored how heavily governments, businesses and individuals rely on a few major cloud providers, raising fresh questions about resilience in global digital infrastructure.