Widespread internet outage brings down Amazon, Canva, Snapchat, Fortnite

A massive internet outage has hit the online world, bringing down major platforms like Amazon, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Canva early today.

The disruption is caused by a severe outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leaving millions of people unable to log in, stream, or even access their smart devices.

According to AWS’s status page, the issue occurred around 3:11 a.m. ET in the US-EAST-1 region, where the company observed “increased error rates and latency” across multiple services. Although centered in the United States, users around the world are currently feeling its impact.

Reddit and X have been flooded with reports showing everything from frozen screens to faulty smart homes. Alexa devices can’t respond to commands, alarms no longer work, and even the McDonald’s app and Airtable are struggling to connect.

A post from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said, “Perplexity is currently down. The root cause is an issue with AWS. We are working to resolve it.”

Amazon confirms AWS investigation is ongoing

At 3:51 a.m. ET, Amazon issued a follow-up, saying its team was “actively working to mitigate the issue and understand the root cause.” They promised to update again within 45 minutes, but no clear recovery schedule was given.

For context, AWS is the world’s largest cloud platform, powering everything from streaming apps to fintech dashboards, so when AWS stumbles, so does the internet.

Down Detector, a popular site used to track crashes in digital services, had nearly every major web platform in the red by dawn.

Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, MyFitnessPal, Xero, Robinhood, Fidelity, JPMorgan, PayPal, Venmo, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Fortnite, Wordle, Duolingo, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, PlayStation, and Pokémon Go were all marked as having critical issues.

Many users experienced login failures, content not loading, or transactions stuck in a loop.

This problem extends beyond entertainment. Payment platforms like Coinbase have experienced downtime, showing how deep AWS’ roots are in the internet economy. Cryptocurrency traders are especially vocal about failed trades and price updates not being updated on time, which is a real nightmare when the market moves quickly.

AWS has not yet determined the cause of the outage, but some engineers on online forums have suggested that an internal service synchronization error may have cascaded across global regions. Some have suggested a misconfiguration of routing within Amazon’s data backbone. Nothing has been confirmed yet, and as of this writing, Amazon has not provided a full explanation or estimated time for recovery.

Until then, the internet will remain unstable.