ISLAMABAD – Snapchat users are wondering why their messages wouldn’t send while, Fortnite players were kicked out of their games and it is all happening as Amazon’s Alexa stopped responding, and bank apps started flashing error messages.
A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of modern internet which has thrown millions of users and companies worldwide into digital disarray. From social media and streaming platforms to banks and airlines, the sudden crash has exposed just how dependent the world has become on Amazon’s cloud empire.
The disruption hit some of the most popular apps and sites on the planet, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Duolingo, Reddit, Hulu, Disney+, Roblox, Amazon Alexa, Ring, Steam, Playstation Network, and dozens more. Even major UK banks such as Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland were caught in the chaos, all posting near-identical updates on X (formerly Twitter) as customers struggled to access accounts.
Monitoring service Downdetector showed a flood of outage reports from users of Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Robinhood, Spectrum, Venmo, Roku, Lyft, Verizon, AT&T, United Airlines, The New York Times, and countless others — a virtual map of disruption stretching across industries and continents.
AWS confirmed that the problem originated in DynamoDB, a critical database service housed in its US-EAST-1 data centre in Virginia, one of the company’s most vital cloud hubs. When DynamoDB failed, it triggered a domino effect that crippled websites and apps depending on it to store and access user data.
As the world’s largest cloud computing platform, AWS powers the invisible infrastructure behind millions of businesses. When it stumbles, the internet itself trembles — and that’s exactly what happened today. For millions of users, login attempts, payments, and data requests simply stopped working.
In a statement, Amazon said its engineers had identified a potential root cause and were working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” The company urged customers to retry failed requests while teams cleared a growing backlog of delayed data operations.
AWS later reported “significant signs of recovery”, claiming that most requests are now processing normally — though lingering issues are still being resolved.
The company promised to share more updates as progress continues or by 2:45 a.m. ET (10:45 a.m. UK time), reassuring businesses that full restoration is underway. The outage has once again raised questions about the world’s heavy reliance on a handful of cloud providers — especially AWS, which dominates global cloud infrastructure. For a few tense hours, the internet’s hidden backbone faltered, taking with it everything from video games to financial transactions.
As normal service begins to return, one thing is clear: when AWS goes down, the world feels it.
