Global Outage: Amazon Web Services Crash Disrupts Snapchat, Roblox, and Other Major Apps

A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s largest internet service providers, caused many popular apps and websites to stop working for hundreds of users globally on Monday.

Services like Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and even Amazon’s own e-commerce site faced significant disruptions. The problem left users unable to log in, send messages, or access content for several hours. Top executives from other major companies, including the AI startup Perplexity and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, also confirmed that their services were affected by the AWS outage.

Amazon Web Services acknowledged the problem, stating it was investigating “increased error rates” in its US-East-1 region, one of its most important data centers. The company later explained that the issue was related to a technical problem that prevented its systems from communicating with each other properly.

Because this data center supports services worldwide, the impact was felt far beyond the United States. Users from different parts of the world took to social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to complain about the service disruptions. Many Snapchat users reported that their messages were not sending and nothing on the app would load.

About two hours after the problems began, AWS announced that it was seeing “early signs of recovery” as its engineers worked to fix the issue. However, the company warned that some services might continue to experience problems until the issue is fully resolved.

This incident highlights how much of the internet relies on a small number of large cloud computing companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. When one of these services faces a problem, it can have a ripple effect, causing outages for many of the apps and websites we use every day.