Massive AWS Outage Cripples Apps, Websites, and Banks Worldwide

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon, is experiencing a widespread outage primarily in its US-EAST-1 region, leading to increased error rates, latencies, and connectivity problems for many dependent platforms and services worldwide.

This has caused disruptions across various apps, websites, and financial institutions that rely on AWS infrastructure.

Key Details on the Outage:

Cause and Scope: AWS engineers are actively working to resolve "increased error rates and latencies" in the affected region.

The issue started surfacing early in the day, impacting a broad range of services due to AWS's role as a backbone for much of the internet. Reports indicate it's not a full global shutdown but has ripple effects, especially for platforms hosted in or reliant on the US-EAST-1 zone. Some speculate it could involve a DDoS attack, though AWS hasn't confirmed that yet.

Affected Services: The outage has hit numerous popular apps and sites, including:

Payment and financial apps: Venmo, PayPal (recently resolved in some cases), Robinhood, Coinbase, Chime, Barclays, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and Nationwide.

Social and communication: Snapchat, Signal, Slack, Zoom.

Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Epic Games Store, Clash Royale, Rocket League.

Productivity and creative tools: Canva, Duolingo, Airtable, MyFitnessPal, Jamf, Twilio.

Entertainment and streaming: Amazon Prime Video, Alexa, Ring, Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Roku.

Other: BT (British Telecom), Perplexity, Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Lyft, McDonald's, Vercel, and even some crypto exchanges like Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC.

Impact on Users: Thousands of reports on DownDetector show users unable to log in, access accounts, make payments, play games, or use features like video streaming. For example, Fortnite servers are offline, and some banking apps in the UK (like Lloyds and Bank of Scotland) experienced glitches earlier but have since recovered in parts.

The outage has exposed heavy reliance on AWS, with about 25% of top websites potentially affected.

Platforms not using AWS, like X (formerly Twitter) or certain decentralized services, remain operational.

Current Status and Recovery: Some services are starting to recover slowly, e.g., Roblox player counts are rebounding, and PayPal/Venmo outages from earlier in the week were fixed, though today's issues persist for others.

AWS has acknowledged the problem on its health dashboard, but no ETA for full resolution has been provided.

In the UK, affected banks like Lloyds have tweeted that services are normalizing.

This isn't the first time, A previous AWS DDoS incident lasted eight hours and affected customers broadly.

For real-time updates, check AWS's status page (health.aws.amazon.com) or DownDetector. If you're impacted, it might be worth waiting it out or trying alternative access methods if available.