Earlier today, a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage crippled vast portions of the internet for several hours, affecting millions of users across the globe. The disruption, which originated in Amazon’s US-East-1 data center cluster in Northern Virginia — one of the world’s most critical cloud regions — impacted users across social, gaming, financial, and enterprise platforms. This region handles massive volumes of internet traffic and backend infrastructure, making the effects of the outage particularly widespread.
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The issue began around 12:30 PM IST, when AWS reported increased error rates and latency across multiple services, disrupting key systems that power countless apps and services used in daily life. Within minutes, platforms like Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, Canva, Perplexity, and Duolingo began showing errors — either failing to load or unable to process user requests. Even Amazon’s own services, including its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video, were affected.
By around 3:30 PM IST, Amazon confirmed significant signs of recovery, stating that most pending requests were beginning to succeed as systems rebooted and traffic was rerouted. Importantly, the outage has not been linked to any known cyberattack. Although Amazon has yet to provide a detailed explanation for the cause, the company has promised to share a follow-up report to maintain transparency.
Several platforms confirmed the outage alongside AWS. Perplexity’s CEO attributed the downtime to an “AWS issue,” while Canva noted “significantly elevated error rates” caused by dependency failures on AWS. During this period, I was personally unable to access Canva, Grammarly, and Perplexity AI — three platforms I regularly use as a writer and journalist to create graphics, refine my writing, and conduct research.
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While AWS claims that most services are now back online, I am still unable to use Grammarly and Canva. The incident underscores the global internet’s heavy dependence on a single cloud provider — a stark reminder that when Amazon Web Services goes down, much of the web goes down with it.
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