AWS Outage Disrupts Global Services: Amazon Confirms US-East-1 Region Failure

A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage crippled thousands of online platforms globally. The disruption began affecting users in the United States and quickly spread worldwide. Services like Snapchat, Robinhood, and Canva experienced significant errors and downtime.

The issue was traced to the critical US-EAST-1 AWS region. According to Reuters, this region supports a vast portion of the internet’s infrastructure. The outage triggered a cascade of failures for companies and users reliant on Amazon’s cloud.

Widespread Impact on Popular Apps and Websites

User reports flooded sites like Down Detector starting around 12 pm IST. Over 14,000 outage reports were logged for Snapchat alone. Investment app Robinhood and design platform Canva were also severely impacted.

The disruption also affected popular gaming and AI services. Players reported issues with PUBG. The AI platform Perplexity AI was also among the services hit. This shows the deep reliance modern apps have on cloud infrastructure.

Amazon’s Response and Path to Recovery

AWS confirmed the issue on its service health dashboard. The company cited “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services. It immediately engaged teams to mitigate the problem and find the root cause.

Amazon identified the DynamoDB database service in US-EAST-1 as an epicenter. This caused a domino effect on other AWS services. The company provided ongoing updates as it worked toward a full resolution, confirming recovery for most services hours later.

The widespread AWS outage underscores the internet’s deep dependency on centralized cloud providers. This event serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of our digital ecosystem. The swift resolution by Amazon engineers prevented a more prolonged global disruption.

Info at your fingertips

Which major apps were affected by the AWS outage?

Snapchat, Robinhood, Canva, and PUBG were among the most prominent platforms disrupted. User reports for these services spiked into the thousands during the peak of the outage.

What was the root cause of the AWS disruption?

Amazon traced significant errors to its DynamoDB service in the US-EAST-1 region. This failure then propagated to other AWS services and global features that depend on that core infrastructure.

How long did the AWS outage last?

The disruption lasted for several hours. Amazon began confirming recovery for most affected services after engaged mitigation efforts. Full resolution was achieved later the same day.

Were users in India affected by this outage?

Yes, the global nature of the outage impacted Indian users. Reports confirmed disruptions on platforms like Snapchat and Canva for users located in India.

What is the US-EAST-1 AWS region?

It is one of Amazon’s oldest and most critical cloud infrastructure regions. A huge number of major online services host their core operations in this specific zone, making its stability vital.

Trusted Sources

Reuters, Associated Press, Down Detector, Amazon Web Services Status Page.