AWS crash causes massive internet blackout, taking down banks and major apps

Chris Price Internet
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Snapchat is one of the sites that is down in the AWS outage

Dozens of internet services, games, and banking apps were knocked offline Monday morning following a major crash involving Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider.

The widespread outage highlighted the fragility of the internet infrastructure that underpins millions of services globally.

The blackout paralyzed essential public services, including the UK Government’s Gateway login service and the HMRC tax website, which displayed error messages to frustrated users. Major financial institutions were also affected, with customers of Lloyds Bank and Halifax reporting problems logging into mobile and online apps, and some even claiming card payments were declined.

The consumer impact was immediate and extensive. Popular apps and services such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring doorbell, and the messaging app Signal all experienced significant outages, according to reports. Cryptocurrency company Coinbase and AI service Perplexity also confirmed they were down due to the AWS issue.

AWS initially reported “significant error rates” linked to DynamoDB, its powerful database system, which is crucial for websites looking up stored data. Engineers were immediately engaged, and the company later confirmed it had identified a potential root cause for the issues within its US-East-1 region, a massive cloud computing hub on the US East Coast.

While engineers worked to accelerate recovery, the incident served as a potent reminder of the massive concentration of internet services on a handful of providers. A previous AWS outage in late 2021 demonstrated the long-lasting effects such a failure can have, bringing even Amazon’s own delivery services to a standstill.


Sites currently down according to Downdetector: 

  • Snapchat
  • Zoom
  • Roblox
  • Clash Royale
  • My Fitness Pal
  • Life360
  • Clash of Clans
  • Fortnite
  • Canva
  • Wordle
  • Signal
  • Coinbase
  • Duolingo
  • Slack
  • Smartsheet
  • PokemonGo
  • Epic Games
  • PlayStation Network
  • Peloton
  • Rocket League
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