On Monday morning, a significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) triggered widespread disruptions across many well-known apps and websites. Among those impacted were Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, UK banking services and Amazon’s own Prime platform.

🕗 Timeline

The outage began at around 08:00 BST (03:00 ET). Monitoring site Down Detector lit up with reports of failures as users were unable to access multiple services.

AWS acknowledged “increased error rates” in the US-EAST-1 region and identified a potential root cause: “We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. … The issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint.”

🔍 Scope and Impact

As a result of the infrastructure fault, services built on AWS faced issues:

• Online apps and gaming platforms: Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite.
• Educational and creative platforms: Duolingo, Canva.
• UK banking and telecom services: Including Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland were inaccessible for online banking.
• AWS itself listed 58 affected services, including EC2, IAM, Lambda, RDS, Kinesis.

📌 What it means for businesses

For mid-sized companies relying on cloud infrastructure, this incident is a clear warning sign. Key take-aways:

• Ensure you have a contingency plan or backup solutions (multi-region deployments, failover).
• Avoid single-vendor or single-region dependency.
• Regularly monitor service statuses via the official AWS dashboard: AWS Service Health
• Review your architecture for critical dependencies on any single service provider or region.

Conclusion

The AWS outage in US-EAST-1 demonstrated that even world-leading cloud infrastructure can face significant disruption. The impact spread far beyond Amazon’s services to apps, banking platforms and media. For businesses using cloud services, this event should trigger a review of architecture, business continuity plans and provider dependencies.

Services Reportedly Impacted by the AWS Outage

During the recent AWS outage, a wide range of platforms and digital services experienced disruptions or full downtime. Reported affected services included:

• Snapchat
• Amazon services (including Amazon.com, Alexa, and Prime Video)
• Duolingo
• Slack
• Zoom
• Discord
• Reddit
• Netflix (partial disruptions reported by users)
• Fortnite and other Epic Games online services
• Tinder
• Ring (Amazon-owned smart home services)
• Coinbase
• Dropbox
• Trello
• Canva
• Spotify (reported slowdowns rather than complete outage)
• Peloton
• BBC online services (access difficulties reported by users in some regions)
• Ubisoft Connect
• Strava

Many users also reported slowdowns or login issues in various SaaS platforms, fintech apps, streaming services, and mobile apps reliant on AWS for authentication, hosting, or backend processing.

Affected AWS services

The following AWS services have been affected by this issue.

Impacted (82 services)

AWS Application Migration Service
AWS B2B Data Interchange
AWS Batch
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Config
AWS DataSync
AWS Database Migration Service
AWS Deadline Cloud
AWS Directory Service
AWS Elemental
AWS End User Messaging
AWS Global Accelerator
AWS Glue
AWS HealthLake
AWS IAM Identity Center
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS IoT Core
AWS Lambda
AWS NAT Gateway
AWS Network Firewall
AWS Organizations
AWS Parallel Computing Service
AWS Payment Cryptography
AWS Private Certificate Authority
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Security Token Service
AWS Site-to-Site VPN
AWS Storage Gateway
AWS Support API
AWS Support Center
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager for SAP
AWS Transfer Family
AWS Transit Gateway
AWS VPCE PrivateLink
AWS Verified Access
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon AppFlow
Amazon AppStream 2.0
Amazon Athena
Amazon Aurora DSQL Service
Amazon Chime
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Connect
Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Container Registry
Amazon Elastic Container Service
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon FSx
Amazon GameLift Servers
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon Interactive Video Service
Amazon Kendra
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
Amazon Location Service
Amazon MQ
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
Amazon Neptune
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Amazon Pinpoint
Amazon Polly
Amazon Q Business
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon SageMaker
Amazon Security Lake
Amazon Simple Email Service
Amazon Simple Queue Service
Amazon Transcribe
Amazon VPC IP Address Manager
Amazon VPC Lattice
Amazon WorkMail
Amazon WorkSpaces