A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has knocked dozens of leading digital platforms offline this morning affecting everything from social media to gaming and enterprise tools.
Apps including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Canva, and Ring began experiencing widespread disruptions from around 8am UK time, according to outage tracker Down Detector.
The issues appear to stem from AWS’s North Virginia data centre, where Amazon confirmed “increased error rates” and delays across multiple services — including Amazon DynamoDB and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which underpin many of the world’s most-used apps.
AWS, which powers much of the modern internet through its cloud hosting infrastructure, provides back-end services for countless companies, meaning outages can ripple quickly across the web.
Alongside consumer apps, other affected platforms include HMRC, Vodafone, Xero, MyFitnessPal, Prime Video, Coinbase, and Playstation.
The incident highlights how dependent global platforms — and their users — have become on a handful of major cloud providers. AWS, which generated $108bn in revenue last year, remains the largest player in the sector and a key profit driver for Amazon.
Amazon has not yet given a timeframe for when services will be fully restored.
