Amazon faced a widespread cloud service outage on Monday, disrupting key platforms such as Prime Video, Alexa, and Amazon.com. The issue, traced to its US-EAST-1 region, one of the company’s primary data hubs in North America, triggered technical failures that rippled across the globe.
According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), engineers detected “increased error rates and latency” in the region, leading to connection interruptions for millions of users and companies depending on AWS infrastructure.
Tech firms and digital platforms hit by AWS disruption
The problems were not limited to Amazon itself. Several major technology platforms relying on AWS infrastructure reported downtime or performance degradation. Among the affected were Venmo, the popular U.S. payment service owned by PayPal, as well as Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.
Even the AI-powered search start-up Perplexity went offline temporarily.
Its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, confirmed on X (formerly Twitter): “Perplexity is currently unavailable due to an issue at AWS. We’re working to resolve it.”
Signal messenger also impacted
In Europe, especially within German-speaking countries, users reported interruptions on the encrypted messenger Signal.
Signal’s president Meredith Whittaker stated that the app’s connectivity issues appeared to be linked to Amazon’s cloud malfunction:
“We’re aware that Signal isn’t working for some people. This seems related to a major AWS outage. Please bear with us.”
No detailed statement from Amazon yet
As of early Tuesday, Amazon had not released an in-depth explanation for the disruption, nor an exact timeline for restoration.
AWS said it was “working on mitigation steps” to reduce the impact and restore normal operations as soon as possible.
Large-scale AWS incidents have become rare, but when they occur, the consequences are felt worldwide due to the platform’s dominance in global cloud computing.
With services from banking and media streaming to AI systems depending on AWS, even short interruptions can paralyse entire segments of the digital economy.
