Amazon Web Services is experiencing a massive outage that's brought down some of the internet's biggest services, including Alexa, Fortnite, Snapchat, and Amazon's own platforms. The infrastructure failure, which began at 3:11 AM ET, is affecting the critical US-EAST-1 region and rippling across global services that depend on AWS cloud infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services just delivered a harsh reminder of how much of the internet runs on its infrastructure. The cloud giant's ongoing outage is taking down everything from your morning Alexa alarm to Epic Games' Fortnite servers, creating chaos across both consumer and enterprise services.
The problems started hitting the AWS status dashboard at 3:11 AM ET, with the company reporting "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region." But this isn't just a regional hiccup - the failure is cascading globally, affecting services that rely on AWS's interconnected infrastructure.
Consumers are getting hit hard. Reddit users report that Alexa devices are completely unresponsive, failing to execute basic commands or pre-programmed routines. Smart home setups that millions rely on for morning alarms, lighting controls, and security systems have essentially gone dark. Testing confirms that even simple requests to Amazon's voice assistant are met with error messages.
The enterprise impact is equally severe. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas took to X to explain the situation bluntly: "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it." The AI-powered search platform joins a growing list of business-critical services experiencing outages, including collaboration tool Airtable, design platform Canva, and even the McDonald's mobile app.
This outage highlights the concentrated risk in cloud infrastructure. AWS controls roughly 32% of the global cloud market, according to recent Synergy Research data, making it the backbone for countless services that consumers and businesses use daily. When AWS's US-EAST-1 region - one of its oldest and most important data center clusters - experiences problems, the effects ripple across the entire internet ecosystem.
The timing couldn't be worse for many companies. Sunday morning outages often catch businesses with reduced technical staff, potentially extending recovery times. For gaming companies like Epic Games, weekend outages hit peak usage periods when players have time to engage with platforms like Fortnite.
Amazon issued its most recent update at 3:51 AM ET, stating "We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share." The company hasn't revealed what's causing the widespread failures or provided any timeline for restoration.
