A major outage in Amazon Web Services disrupts major websites and applications in the United States
Amazon announced on Monday, October 20, a widespread outage affecting its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), leading to significant disruptions for various widely-used websites and applications, including Snapchat and the American financial services platform Robinhood.
The company confirmed in a statement that the outage was caused by “an increase in error rates and response delays in several AWS services within the US-EAST-1 region,” which is one of its primary server hosting areas.
The disruptions were not limited to social media and financial platforms; other tech companies such as the AI startup Perplexity and the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase also reported slow performance and temporary service outages.
AWS serves as a fundamental pillar of global digital infrastructure, hosting a vast number of websites and applications used daily around the world, making any outage of this magnitude highlight the extent to which companies and economic institutions rely on Amazon’s cloud services.
Amazon has not yet disclosed the exact causes of the outage but has confirmed that it is working to gradually restore services to normal as soon as possible.
