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A major technical outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruptions on Monday, knocking dozens of popular applications and websites offline, including Amazon, Roblox, Fortnite and Snapchat.
The outage, which primarily affected users in the U.S. and Europe, stemmed from an "operational problem" at the company's data center in North Virginia, AWS said in a statement.
Internet outage monitor Downdetector received over 4,000 user reports of access problems, according to data. Affected services included Ring doorbells, with users reporting "failed to connect" signs.
The list of affected apps and sites included Zoom, Canva, PlayStation Network, Slack, Wordle and Coinbase. Banks including Halifax, Lloyds and the Bank of Scotland were also impacted, according to Downdetector. The website for the U.K.'s tax authority, HMRC, also displayed an error message.
AWS confirmed "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region" on its service status page.
In a later update, the company said it "identified a potential root cause" for the error rates.
"Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1," AWS stated.
Engineers were "immediately engaged" and "working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery," the company added. In its latest update, AWS said it had applied "initial mitigations" and was "observing early signs of recovery" for some services.
AWS is Amazon's cloud computing division, and its infrastructure underpins millions of large companies' websites and smartphone apps.
Not all platforms were affected. Google services, which run on that company's own cloud, appeared stable. Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram, as well as the X platform, also seemed to be running normally.
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