A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruption across popular apps and online platforms on Monday, affecting millions of users globally.

The incident, traced to AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, led to outages across a wide range of digital services — including Perplexity AI, Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Alexa, Ring, Canva, Duolingo, and financial platforms such as Robinhood and Venmo.

According to Amazon’s official service status page, the company reported increased error rates and latency across several key services. The first signs of trouble appeared at around 12:41 p.m. IST, when AWS confirmed issues impacting multiple applications in the US-EAST-1 region.

In a statement issued shortly after, AWS said:

“We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”

Global Impact

The outage began during the early hours of Monday in the US, rapidly generating thousands of user complaints on the monitoring site Downdetector. Reports peaked around 12:30 p.m. IST, with users citing connection timeouts, login failures, and disrupted access to cloud-based services.

Social media was soon flooded with posts from around the world, with users describing failures in smart-home devices, streaming platforms, and even enterprise software reliant on AWS infrastructure.

Perplexity AI’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, confirmed the dependency on AWS in a post on X (formerly Twitter):

“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

Infrastructure Affected

The disruption hit several of AWS’s core components, including Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, and Global Accelerator — critical systems that underpin web hosting, data storage, and content delivery for thousands of online services.

Even Amazon’s own internal tools were reportedly affected, illustrating the deep integration and reliance many digital ecosystems now have on AWS’s infrastructure.

As of the latest updates, AWS engineers have restored normal service operations. The company has not yet provided a definitive explanation for the outage, which underscores the systemic risks of centralized cloud infrastructure on which much of the modern internet depends.