Amazon Web Services reported a significant disruption on Monday morning, with multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region experiencing increased error rates and latency.
The outage has affected a broad range of platforms that rely on AWS infrastructure, with complaints spiking shortly after 7:30 a.m. London time, according to Downdetector and media reports.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said on its AWS health dashboard. Engineers were “immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” the company added, noting customers in northern Virginia may be unable to create or update support cases during the incident. Amazon said it would provide status updates roughly every 45 minutes.
The disruption has had knock-on effects for consumer and enterprise services. The Verge reported outages for Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat and Fortnite, while users on Reddit described Alexa as unable to respond to queries or complete requests. Perplexity’s chief executive officer Aravind Srinivas wrote on X: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” A post shared by Sky News highlighted issues across major platforms, and noted Coinbase reassured customers that “all funds are safe” as it monitored the situation.
BBC News’ live coverage cited user reports, with outages also hitting bank services and popular apps including Duolingo and Roblox. In a technical note, BBC reported AWS had acknowledged “significant error rates for requests” to an endpoint affecting services in US-EAST-1, one of its busiest regions. Sky News reported that DynamoDB, AWS’s managed database service, was flagged with “significant error rates,” with impacts spilling into other services in that region.
While the cause has not yet been confirmed, AWS has a history of incidents in US-EAST-1, with previous outages in 2020, 2021 and 2023 creating widespread disruptions before service was restored. ThousandEyes data referenced by Sky News showed many outages concentrated in the United States, particularly Virginia, a major hub for data centres.
As of 10:00 a.m. Monday 20 October, platforms and providers continued to report instability while waiting for further updates from Amazon. Bloomberg reported that complaints were numbering in the thousands and noted an Amazon representative had not immediately responded to requests for comment.
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