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Amazon Web Services Outage TakesWebsites & Apps Offline

UPDATE: Hundreds of websites and apps which went offline temporarily in North America and Europe on Monday morning following an outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in North Virginia appeared to be functioning as normal as the U.S. woke up. Earlier in the day, Amazon Services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video […]

UPDATE: Hundreds of websites and apps which went offline temporarily in North America and Europe on Monday morning following an outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in North Virginia appeared to be functioning as normal as the U.S. woke up.

Earlier in the day, Amazon Services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Alexa went down or suffered slowdowns, alongside messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Snapchat as well as entertainment and game sites including IMDb, Disney+, Fortnite, Roblox and Wordle among many.

In its latest update at 7.29am PDT related to the data center outage, AWS, which provides cloud services to thousands of businesses worldwide, said the situation was improving but gave no reason for the caused of the problem.

“We have confirmed multiple AWS services experienced network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are seeing early signs of recovery for the connectivity issues and are continuing to investigate the root cause,” read the message.

In the backdrop, e-commerce experts said that the resumption of connectivity was just one part of the story, warning that Monday morning’s outage would likely have longer-term consequences for businesses operating on the web.

“When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users but also trigger a domino effect across payment flows,” said Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of e-commerce services provider Chargebacks911 and Fi911.

“What I expect now is a spike in ‘I never got my service’ or ‘I was charged twice’ claims. Many of those won’t be fraud, just confusion. But confusion is the number one driver of chargebacks. If merchants sit back and wait for disputes to roll in, they will bleed revenue unnecessarily.”

She urged online businesses to get ahead of the curve by running duplicate charge sweeps, pushing out proactive notifications to affected users and issuing prompt refunds to impacted customers.

“The outage will end long before the disputes do. Any business that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind. Downtime happens, but silence and slow responses are what cause real damage.”

Ismael Wrixen, CEO of  digital commerce platform ThriveCart said the outage should serve a wakeup call for all operators in the space.

Today’s outage isn’t just an ‘East Coast AWS’ problem; it’s a reminder that 100% uptime is a myth for everyone. The internet runs on shared infrastructure. The real story isn’t just that AWS had a critical issue, but how many businesses discovered their platform partner had no plan for it, especially outside of U.S. hours. This is a harsh wake-up call about the critical need for multi-regional redundancy and intelligent architecture.”

Previously at 1.50am PDT: Hundreds of online services went temporarily offline across North America and Europe on Monday morning amid suggestions that the problem was linked to an outage at an Amazon Web Services data center in North Virginia.

Alongside Amazon services such as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Alexa a slew of other websites and apps also suffered problems, including Signal, Life360, Roblox, Zoom, Fortnight, IMDb, and Disney+ among many.

The issue appeared to be linked to a severe outage at an AWS facility in North Virginia, but it has yet to be confirmed if this is the sole cause of wider issues, which were reported both in North America and Europe.

AWS first reporting “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” just after midnight PT, with its latest message at 1.26am PT, saying the issue was ongoing.

“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” read the message.

“This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:00 AM.”

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, was one of the first to point to the AWS outage at the cause of the problem, with a post on X saying: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it”.

The issue first started hitting the news as people woke up in Europe to discover a number of websites and apps were not working.

Monitoring sites such as Downdetector started to report a spike in issues for multiple sites and apps at around 8am UK time (midnight PT).

Beyond entertainment and media sites, a number of banking sites were also impacted including the UK’s Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and Halifax as well as cryptocurrency site Coinbase. The latter put out a statement saying all funds were safe.

The incident has echoes of an outage at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike in July 2024, which impacted 8.5 million Window devices worldwide, disrupting airlines, banks and government services at an estimated cost of $10b overall.

The exact cause of the outage has yet to be ascertained

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