A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused significant disruptions for numerous major online services, including the popular game Fortnite, the social media app Snapchat, and Amazon’s own Alexa assistant. The incident, which originated in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, left users unable to access or use key features of these platforms.
Users began reporting issues across various services, with outage tracking website Downdetector.com registering sharp spikes in problem reports for both Fortnite and Snapchat. The impact was not limited to entertainment apps, as the AI search engine Perplexity also confirmed it was affected by the AWS problems.
Major Services Confirm Widespread Disruptions
Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, publicly acknowledged the incident’s impact on its services. The company reported that the outage was causing issues with logins, matchmaking, and other core game functionalities. Similarly, Snapchat users experienced widespread problems with the application’s performance and connectivity. The disruptions extended to Amazon’s own ecosystem, with its Alexa voice assistant also experiencing service issues related to the outage.
Power Outage Identified as Root Cause
Amazon addressed the situation on its official health status dashboard, providing details on the root cause. The company reported that the issues stemmed from a power outage at a single data center located within one of the Availability Zones in its US-EAST-1 region. This power failure directly impacted network connectivity for services hosted in that facility.
In subsequent updates, Amazon confirmed that power had been restored to the affected data center and that network connectivity was recovering. The company stated that its teams were actively working to recover the impacted instances and services following the power restoration.
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