The internet has been thrown into chaos today after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage that affected thousands of apps, websites, and online services around the world. Popular platforms like Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Duolingo, and Ring have all gone down or become unstable. Even major financial services, smart home tools, and entertainment sites are reporting serious disruptions.

Reports began early in the morning, and Downdetector, a website used to track outages, was flooded with reports from frustrated users. We’re currently seeing giant red spikes across dozens of services at the same time, so it’s not a small issue.

According to Game Union TV, this incident is large in scale. They explained, “Amazon Web Services (#AWS) infrastructure collapsed and thousands of their clients are facing issues (everything from #Asana to Crunchyroll, McDonald’s and #Roblox).” This means the damage reaches far beyond simple entertainment apps, as every service that relies on AWS to function is experiencing disruptions.

The problem seems to have started at one of Amazon's most important data centers located in North Virginia, USA. When something breaks there, the effects spread quickly. Amazon has confirmed that it is investigating what it calls “increased error rates” affecting two major AWS services: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and DynamoDB.

Amazon's own systems have also been hit. Users trying to contact AWS support to report problems were unable to do so, as the AWS service page itself crashed and began showing a message that simply read: “Service page is currently unavailable.”

Right now, a long list of major services remains down or unstable, and Amazon has not yet given a timeline for when everything will go back to normal. AWS engineers are trying to fix the problem, but because it affects core systems, it could take hours before all services are fully restored.

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.