A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for several hours on Monday morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET, and later said at 6:35AM ET that the underlying issue “has been fully mitigated,” though continued working to restore all impacted systems throughout the day.
Amazon provided a final update at 6:53PM ET, announcing that “all AWS services returned to normal operations” by 6:01PM ET. The company attributed the outage to resolution issues in its domain name system (DNS) which translates website domains into machine-readable IP addresses. Amazon says the issue originated “from within the EC2 internal network,” and that any services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints were impacted by the outage.
The AWS issue impacted many platforms and services running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, Zapier, and the McDonalds app. Some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity, had announced that they were back online around four hours after Amazon reported the outage, as the company continued working to fully restore the AWS service.
Users on Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and others experienced gaps in recording for Amazon’s Ring security cameras. The outage even took out my alarm on Monday morning -- the weekday routine for Alexa to sound an alert on my Echo Dot was stuck in a loop saying it couldn’t connect to the internet. Once I eventually woke up, I found out about the massive outage just like many of you.
AWS outages in the widely-used US-East-1 region created widespread disruptions in 2020, 2021, and 2023, forcing many major services offline before regular service was restored.
Update, October 20th: Added status updates from Amazon.
Update, October 21st: Added resolution update from Amazon.
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