A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for several hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. Some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity had announced that they are fully recovered and back online earlier this morning, while others are still having issues.
The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET, and eventually said that “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated.” According to Amazon’s latest notes, “the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network,” and the most recent update was published at 12:13PM ET:
We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT.
Users on Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and others experienced gaps in recording for Amazon’s Ring security cameras. The outage even took out my alarm this morning — the weekday routine for Alexa to sound an alert on my Echo Dot was stuck in a loop saying it couldn’t connect to the internet. Once I eventually woke up, I found out about today’s massive outage just like many of you.
AWS outages in the widely-used US-East-1 region created widespread disruptions in 2020, 2021, and 2023, forcing many major services offline before regular service was restored.
The AWS issue impacted many platforms and services running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, Zapier, and the McDonalds app.
Update, October 20th: Added status updates from Amazon.
