By Gareth Vipers
A major Amazon Web Services outage Monday disrupted the global internet, interrupting services from major retailers, airlines, social-media apps, financial-services companies and more.
Sites including Facebook, Snapchat and Amazon were unavailable early Monday, with financial services Coinbase, Robinhood and Venmo also reporting disruptions. The far-reaching outage impacted productivity tools such as Slack, some airlines including United, AI tool Perplexity and videogames including Fortnite and Roblox.
The AWS infrastructure underpins millions of websites and platforms, providing cloud-computing services such as servers, computing power and storage to the world's biggest companies. Any problems with the AWS network can have a major impact on the wider internet. Many of the popular mobile apps also rely on AWS systems.
AWS said earlier on its website that it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services" in a region of data centers on the eastern seaboard of the U.S., centered around Northern Virginia. Engineers were "engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause," the company added.
Users began reporting problems starting around 3 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions.
In an update around 5:30 a.m ET, Amazon said its systems were recovering and that many websites and apps were coming back online.
The company said the issues stem from problems with the Amazon DynamoDB system, which provides websites with database storage and computing power.
AWS has suffered outages before, spurring disruptions at other companies and underscoring how regional digital infrastructure problems can have far-reaching effects.
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud-computing service provider in the U.S. and has become one of the market leaders globally. While outages in cloud services aren't uncommon, they have become more noticeable as more companies have come to rely on them.
The Wall Street Journal was among several media organizations affected by the outage.
Write to Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 20, 2025 06:31 ET (10:31 GMT)
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