The disruption, which affected a range of applications including Fortnite, Snapchat, Prime Video, Coinbase, and Robinhood, underscored the world’s deep reliance on Amazon’s cloud ecosystem. AWS confirmed it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” but did not specify the cause of the failure. It is the first major global tech disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, which paralyzed systems in hospitals, airports, and banks worldwide.
AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon, supplies cloud computing power, storage, and software services that underpin the digital operations of businesses, governments, and startups globally. When its systems falter, the effects cascade across industries — halting e-commerce, communications, entertainment, and even government portals. The company, which competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, directed inquiries to its service status page, while Amazon itself offered no immediate public comment.
Among those hardest hit were AI startup Perplexity, which confirmed via CEO Aravind Srinivas that the outage originated from AWS issues; Coinbase and Robinhood, which both reported downtime in trading operations; and Prime Video and Alexa, which experienced widespread disruptions. Gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans also went offline for hours, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Financial services including Venmo and Chime were similarly affected.
In the United States, Lyft users reported difficulties accessing the ride-hailing app, while Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the encrypted messaging platform was impacted as well. Across the Atlantic, British institutions including Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and telecom giants Vodafone and BT reported partial service interruptions. The UK’s tax and customs authority, HMRC, also suffered downtime.
Despite the widespread impact, some platforms remained unscathed. Elon Musk noted succinctly on X (formerly Twitter): “X works.”
As AWS continues to restore full service, the incident serves as a stark reminder of how much of the modern digital economy depends on the resilience of a few massive cloud providers — and how a single disruption can momentarily shake the foundations of global connectivity.