Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered a major outage on Monday, disrupting several popular global web services and applications, including Canva, Snapchat, and others
In an update released by the company, AWS disclosed that it experienced an operational issue affecting multiple services in its US East Coast region.
The disruption, which began in the early hours of Monday, caused widespread downtime across websites and mobile applications that rely heavily on AWS’s cloud infrastructure.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause,” the company stated in its operational update.
Affected platforms
Reports from outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed that several high-profile services, including Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Clash Royale, MyFitnessPal, Life360, Fortnite, Canva, Duolingo, Signal, Slack, and Peloton, experienced disruptions.
Other platforms such as Coinbase, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, and the London Stock Exchange Group’s data services were also affected.
Aravind Srinivas, Chief Executive Officer of Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that the platform’s downtime was linked to AWS.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” he wrote.
Canva, with over 170 million monthly users global in a brief post on X, the company acknowledged the issue
“Our cloud provider is currently experiencing problems. It’s not the experience we want for you, and we’re working closely with them to help re-establish service. Thanks for your patience and understanding as we work to bring things back to normal,” they said
“You can check canvastatus.com for updates. We’ll keep you posted!” they added.
As of the time of reporting, there have been no confirmed reports of the outage affecting Nigerian users.
AWS’s dominance
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the global leader in cloud-computing services, ahead of Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. Its systems power major digital platforms, mobile applications, and government services across the world.
It offers on-demand access to computing power, data storage, networking, analytics tools, artificial-intelligence platforms and many other services, all delivered over the internet, so companies don’t need to build and maintain their own physical data centres.
Because of these roles, problems at AWS can ripple through many companies and sectors. When AWS goes down or has an outage, services built on it may suffer across industries.
Although the scale of the outage has not been fully determined, early reports suggest that millions of users across various platforms were affected.
