A significant global outage occurred on March 18, 2024, impacting Amazon”s cloud services, according to notifications from the maintenance page of its subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS). This disruption has affected a wide array of websites and applications, including Amazon Prime, Perplexity, Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and Duolingo.
Messages on AWS”s maintenance site reported “increased error rates” across numerous services. The company”s engineers are actively working to restore full functionality. Perplexity, a startup focused on artificial intelligence, confirmed that its service was down due to the AWS issues. CEO Aravind Srinivas shared on social media platform X that they are addressing the situation.
AWS offers on-demand computing power, data storage, and various digital solutions to businesses, governments, and individual users, making it a crucial infrastructure provider. Outages in AWS can lead to widespread disruptions for numerous websites and platforms that depend on its cloud capabilities. Competing cloud service providers include Google and Microsoft.
Reports from Downdetector indicated that users were experiencing problems with Amazon”s shopping website, Prime Video, and Alexa. Popular gaming platforms such as Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, as well as Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans, were also reported to be down. Financial services like PayPal”s Venmo and Chime faced disruptions during the outage as well.
The service interruption also affected ride-sharing applications, with users of Lyft reporting outages. Additionally, Signal”s President, Meredith Whittaker, confirmed on X that the messaging platform was also affected by the AWS outage.
As of now, both AWS and Amazon have not issued a public statement regarding the situation.
