Amazon Cloud Outage causes Global Internet chaos

A major global outage has brought large parts of the internet to its knees, after a technical failure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the world’s largest cloud platform – disrupted access to dozens of major websites, apps, and video games across the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The AWS crash, which began early Monday, October 20, quickly escalated into a worldwide issue, leaving users unable to access everything from Amazon.com and Prime Video to Snapchat, Zoom, and Fortnite. The company confirmed that several of its systems in the US-EAST-1 region were experiencing “increased error rates and latency,” resulting in widespread outages.

In a status update, Amazon acknowledged: “We are working actively to mitigate the problem and understand its root cause.” The company added that customers may have trouble creating or updating support cases while engineers attempt to stabilise the affected servers.

Social media platforms were flooded with complaints as millions of users reported errors, frozen screens, or complete service failures. On X (formerly Twitter), “AWS Down” quickly became a trending topic worldwide, reflecting the scale of disruption caused by what experts are calling one of the largest cloud service failures of the year.

Major Platforms and Apps Knocked Offline

The outage has affected a wide range of online services that depend on AWS for their cloud infrastructure. In the United States, users were unable to access Amazon, Alexa, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Canva, Duolingo, and Perplexity AI, while social networks like Snapchat and Goodreads were also hit.

Popular online games, including Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash Royale, suffered major connectivity issues, frustrating players worldwide. In Europe, several Amazon services remained operational – though Alexa continued to struggle – but users across the continent still experienced similar failures when trying to access apps and streaming platforms linked to AWS.

According to outage tracking site Down Detector, reports of service disruptions skyrocketed from early morning. More than 14,000 incidents were recorded in the US and over 4,000 in the UK, with the list of affected services reading like a who’s who of the digital world:

• Amazon Web Services
• Snapchat
• Zoom
• Ring
• Lloyds Bank
• Halifax
• Canva
• HMRC
• MyFitnessPal
• Slack
• Duolingo
• Fortnite
• Alexa
• IMDb
• Amazon Prime Video

The failures have also disrupted financial services, cloud storage, and business tools, with companies reporting difficulties in processing transactions and accessing key data.

A Reminder of how fragile the internet really is

This global incident serves as a stark reminder of just how dependent modern life has become on a handful of massive cloud providers — particularly Amazon, whose AWS platform powers everything from entertainment and e-commerce to government databases and banking apps.

“When AWS falters, the impact is instant and far-reaching,” said one cybersecurity analyst. “We’ve built our digital world on shared infrastructure, and today shows how fragile that system can be.”

While AWS has faced outages before, Monday’s disruption is one of the most severe in recent memory. Experts say that as cloud computing becomes even more central to daily life, such incidents could have increasingly real-world consequences, from missed business meetings and halted payments to inaccessible home security systems and entertainment platforms.

Amazon’s engineers are still working to restore normal operations, with updates expected throughout the day. For now, millions around the globe remain digitally stranded, waiting for the modern internet’s ‘invisible engine’ to roar back to life.