AWS outage: Snapchat, Perplexity, Signal among dozens apps affected; check list

Several of the world’s most popular apps and websites, including Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva, experienced major service disruptions on Monday, after a suspected outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted parts of the internet.

Outage-tracking website Down Detector showed a surge in reports starting around 12:20 p.m. IST.

Users across multiple countries were unable to access or use several online platforms properly.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed that the AI-powered answer engine was down due to AWS issue.

"Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it," he wrote on X.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon.com, confirmed on its service health dashboard that multiple services in the North Virginia region were facing “increased error rates and latencies” due to a DNS resolution issue affecting one of the company’s core database services.

“We have identified a potential root cause... related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” AWS said in an update. “The issue also affects other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues.”

In another update, AWS said it has applied initial mitigations and is observing "early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services."

"During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution," AWS said.

"We recommend customers retry failed requests. While requests begin succeeding, there may be additional latency and some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process," it added.

AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there's an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

• Amazon.com
• Prime Video
• Disney+
• Alexa
• Robinhood
• Snapchat
• Perplexity AI
• Venmo
• Life360
• Roku
• Lyft
• Canvas by Instructure
• Crunchyroll
• Roblox
• Whatnot
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Coinbase
• Canva
• Duolingo
• Goodreads
• Ring
• The New York Times
• Fortnite
• Apple TV
• Verizon
• Chime
• McDonald’s App
• CollegeBoard
• Wordle
• PUBG Battlegrounds