Widespread AWS outage disrupts major online services including Fortnite and ChatGPT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing a widespread outage.

This failure has affected numerous online platforms such as Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services, in addition to Amazon’s own services.

First signals came from the US East Coast

According to information on the company’s status monitoring page, many services were “affected by operational issues.”

As reported by The Verge portal, AWS stated in its initial announcement, “We have observed an increase in errors and latency in the US-EAST-1 region on the US East Coast, and we are investigating the cause of the incident.”

However, it is noted that the outages were not limited to this region and had global effects.

Users reported problems on social media

Reddit users reported that the Alexa smart assistant was not responding to commands and was unable to perform routine tasks.

Similarly, it is stated that pre-set alarms and routines were also not working.

The outage also caused disruptions on other platforms that use AWS cloud infrastructure, such as Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonald’s app.

While the cause of the failure has not yet been clarified, it is unknown when services will fully return to normal.

Companies issue successive statements

Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, stated on the X platform, “Perplexity is currently inaccessible. The root cause is AWS-related. We are working to resolve the issue.”

Fortnite’s official support account also informed users, publishing the message, “An outage affecting various services across the internet is also impacting Fortnite logins. We are investigating the issue and will share updates as they become available.”

AWS: We are seeing significant improvement

The AWS control panel first reported problems on the US East Coast at 03:11 local time.

In an update published at 03:51, Amazon announced, “We are actively working to mitigate the issue and understand its cause. We will provide another update within 45 minutes or sooner if we have new information.”

In a subsequent message shared by the company at 05:27, it was stated, “We are seeing signs of significant recovery. We assess that most requests are now succeeding. We continue to process the backlog of requests.”

The same region has caused problems before

Such outages in AWS’s infrastructure, particularly in the US-EAST-1 region, had previously led to widespread disruptions in 2020, 2021, and 2023.

Due to these incidents, many websites and platforms experienced access issues for hours, and services only gradually returned to normal after the problem was resolved.