Several popular apps and websites were temporarily inaccessible on Monday after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major disruption affecting users worldwide.
Gatekeepers News reports that according to Downdetector, a platform that monitors online service interruptions, more than four million outage reports were logged globally — more than twice the normal weekday average of 1.8 million.
The tracker said, “At 06:56 UTC (02:56 AM EDT), users began reporting issues with AWS, especially within the US East 1 region. By 09:50 AM BST (08:50 UTC), over 500 companies across our 66 monitored sites were affected.”
The downtime disrupted services that rely on AWS’s cloud infrastructure, including Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Canvas, Signal, Coinbase, Wordle, Fortnite, Clash Royale, MyFitnessPal, Life360, and Clash of Clans.
AWS acknowledged the issue in a statement, explaining that it appears to be related to DNS resolution, referring to how web servers are accessed online.
The Domain Name System (DNS) functions like an online phonebook, converting website names into numerical IP addresses that computers can understand. When DNS fails, users are unable to reach websites or online platforms.
Reports indicate that the disruption originated from Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia, which hosts one of AWS’s largest data centres and serves as a key hub for global internet traffic.
AWS said it is currently working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery and has observed recovery across most of the affected AWS services.
