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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has taken down online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. The AWS status checker is reporting that multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region are “impacted” by operational issues, though outages also affected services in other regions globally.
As of 6:35AM ET, Amazon says that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now” 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. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said in an update published at 3:51AM ET.
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 are not functioning. The AWS issue also appeared to be impacting platforms running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonalds app. The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be full restored.
“Perplexity is down right now,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
In a 5:27AM ET update, Amazon says “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.