AWS Outage Brings Down Major Apps, Websites
The outage hit big names like Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, and Zoom, and reminded everyone how much of the internet quietly runs on Amazon’s servers.
News
- OpenAI Weighs Trillion-Dollar IPO Following Major Restructuring
- After AWS, Microsoft Faces Wide Azure Outage Before Earnings
- OpenAI Sets 2026 Goal for AI Research Intern, Plans $1.4T Compute Push
- OpenAI Becomes a For-Profit Company
- Jindal Steel Names Gautam Malhotra CEO
- AI Agents are Now Part of the Developer Workflow, Satya Nadella Says
[Image source: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
If you woke up today and Strava refused to work, it wasn’t a sign for you to skip your run. In fact, a major part of the internet — Amazon Web Services — went down early this morning, causing a major online friction. The outage hit big names like Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, and Zoom, and reminded everyone how much of the internet quietly runs on Amazon’s servers.
At first, it seemed like a small glitch. Reddit pages wouldn’t load, Alexa stayed silent, payments on Venmo froze. But soon, reports of problems began to pour in — tens of thousands of them. The issue, engineers later said, was linked to DynamoDB, a database service by Amazon.
Although the root cause of the incident apparently affected a single API in just one of many AWS cloud regions, it provided a key database service on which many services — Amazon’s own and those of its customers — were built, in that and other regions.
By 3 PM IST, Amazon said it had found and fixed the problem. But recovery takes time. Even after the patch, Reddit continued to stay down, and smaller apps continued to struggle.
“Perplexity is down right now,” Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, wrote on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
Ten platforms with their own infrastructure — including Microsoft Teams and Apple Music — experienced brief disruptions, underscoring how closely linked the internet’s systems have become.
The exact cause of the outage is still unknown, and Amazon has not provided a timeline for full restoration. Most affected websites and apps are now functioning normally, and AWS said the underlying issue has been mitigated. However, the company noted that “some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” suggesting minor delays could persist as systems fully recover.
AWS outages in the US-East-1 region have caused similar large-scale disruptions in the past — in 2020, 2021, and 2023 — temporarily taking multiple websites and platforms offline for several hours before normal operations resumed, according to The Verge.
