is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for around four hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more.
As of 6:35AM ET, the AWS status checker is reporting that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” and some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity have announced that they are fully recovered and back online.
However, as of 9:50AM ET, Amazon says that multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region are still “impacted” by operational issues, and that it is working towards a full resolution. The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET, with global services in other regions also taken offline. The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be fully restored.
Users on Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and in my own experience, I found that routines like pre-set alarms were not functioning. The AWS issue also impacted platforms running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonalds app.
“We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon said in an update published at 3:51AM ET. In a 5:27AM ET update, Amazon said “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.”
AWS outages in the US-East-1 region have created widespread disruptions in 2023, 2021, and 2020, forcing multiple websites and platforms offline for several hours before regular service was restored.
Update, October 20th: added status updates from Amazon.
