Massive outage hits Reddit, Snapchat, Venmo, and more
Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a major outage on Monday that disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide, including Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Duolingo, Coinbase, and even Amazon’s own platforms like Alexa and Prime Video. The incident marks the largest internet disruption since the 2023 CrowdStrike malfunction that impacted hospitals and banks across multiple countries.
As of noon ET, some services had begun to recover, but AWS confirmed that several of its systems were still affected. At 11:46 a.m. ET, Downdetector logged more than 7,800 outage reports, up from 5,800 earlier in the day.
Root cause traced to AWS EC2 network
In an official update, AWS stated that the disruption originated from an internal subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers. The issue was localized in the EC2 internal network—Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud—which allows businesses to scale cloud computing as needed.
The problem stemmed from the US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, AWS’s oldest and most widely used data center, which has experienced outages in previous years. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had stabilized, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, continued to show signs of failure.
Impact felt across industries and regions
The outage affected a wide range of industries, from fintech to gaming. Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Fortnite all experienced disruptions. In the UK, banks like Lloyds and telecom providers such as Vodafone and BT were impacted. The UK’s tax agency HMRC also faced downtime.
Artificial intelligence platform Perplexity and messaging app Signal were also affected. While Elon Musk confirmed that X (formerly Twitter) remained functional, other platforms struggled for hours to restore access.
Outage exposes centralization risks
Experts noted that the incident highlights the global dependence on a handful of cloud providers. “The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service,” said Nishanth Sastry of the University of Surrey.
Although there is no evidence of a cyberattack, the scale of disruption led to speculation. “AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset,” said Rafe Pilling from cybersecurity firm Sophos.
Ookla reported over 4 million users experienced service issues during the event. While AWS continues to implement mitigation steps, full recovery is still in progress.
