By Tiffany Williams –
An Amazon Web Services outage sent shockwaves through the internet early Monday, crippling major apps, websites, and digital platforms worldwide.
Amazon’s massive cloud-computing arm — which powers everything from government servers to Fortune 500 companies — began experiencing problems around 3 a.m. Eastern Time, according to DownDetector, which tracks online service failures.
Users reported widespread issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Coinbase, Ring, Venmo, Robinhood, and even the McDonald’s app. Universities, corporations, and news organizations including The Associated Press also rely on AWS for critical systems.
By 2:54 a.m., DownDetector logged just under 500 outage reports. Less than an hour later, that number exploded to more than 13,000. Reports flooded in from New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, and St. Louis — a nationwide breakdown in one of the internet’s most essential backbones.
Amazon confirmed the disruption on its official AWS status page, saying engineers were “working to understand what’s causing the problem” in the company’s eastern U.S. region, where much of its infrastructure is based.
Amazon said it had “identified a potential root cause” and was “seeing significant signs of recovery.” Still, the outage left many users and businesses offline for hours, underscoring how deeply embedded AWS has become in the digital ecosystem.