In the early hours of the morning (Central European Time), Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage that disrupted millions of users across the United States and, progressively, also affected Europe and Italy.
According to real-time monitoring site Downdetector, more than 2,400 outage reports were submitted in the U.S., while over 100 incidents were logged in Italy. The disruption affected multiple platforms and applications that rely on AWS’s massive cloud infrastructure.
What Happened
Amazon confirmed the issue in an official statement:
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region.”
The US-EAST-1 region, located in Virginia, is one of AWS’s most critical operational hubs. Many global services use this region to process and store data, meaning that a disruption there can cascade worldwide.
The mention of rising “error rates” and “latencies” means that applications depending on AWS were either unable to connect properly or were running extremely slowly.
Platforms and Apps Affected
Beyond Amazon’s own cloud division, several major platforms experienced downtime or degraded performance, including:
Robinhood (trading app)
Snapchat
Perplexity AI, the fast-growing AI search platform
Venmo, PayPal’s payment service
Canva, the graphic design platform
Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange
Even Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa experienced issues, according to Downdetector reports in the U.S.
Perplexity’s CEO confirmed that the root cause was linked to Amazon’s infrastructure, underscoring the widespread dependency on AWS services.
Global Impact
Because AWS underpins a massive portion of the global internet ecosystem — powering millions of websites, apps, and APIs — the incident had an immediate ripple effect worldwide.
Companies faced cloud connection failures, API slowdowns, and database errors, leading to service interruptions for end users.
Amazon has stated that engineers are working to fully restore operations, but the incident has reignited concerns about the global reliance on a handful of major cloud providers.
