A major Amazon Web Services outage temporarily cripples platforms like Snapchat, Duolingo and Roblox
The UK Treasury and the Lloyds Banking Group are also affected by the incident, which originated in the United States
Barcelona / LondonAn Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, the cloud computing division of the US tech giant, caused a widespread disruption of digital services worldwide on Monday morning. The company confirmed "an increase in error rates and latency across multiple services" in its US-East-1 region, based in Northern Virginia, one of the most widely used globally for hosting websites and applications.
According the monitoring site Downdetector, the incidents began around 9:00 a.m. (Central European Time), with a sharp increase in reports from users unable to access platforms such as Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Fortnite, and Alexa. Problems were also reported with the UK Treasury website. A few minutes later, AWS published its first statement acknowledging the outage and explaining that its engineers were "working to identify the cause and implement mitigation measures."
The effects of the outage were global and affected dozens of companies that rely on AWS services for their daily operations. However, there were no major impacts in Spain initially. The affected platforms also include Canva, Ring, Coinbase, Perplexity, Robinhood and several services from Lloyds Banking Group, according to British media reports such as The Guardian. In some cases, users were unable to log in, while in others, applications simply failed to load or returned connection errors.
The problem, according to technical sources, originated in DynamoDB, AWS’s database system, which stores essential information for millions of users and processes data in real time. When this infrastructure stops responding, all dependent services fail in a chain reaction. AWS itself said that the outage affected "other essential services in the US-East-1 region" and even its own technical support tools.
The company has not yet provided an official estimate of the duration of the incident or the number of affected users, but industry sources cited by the BBC suggest that it could have lasted several hours and caused millions of failed connections worldwide. However, as the morning progressed, some companies reported a gradual recovery, although many services continued to experience slowdowns or intermittent errors.
The economic impact is difficult to quantify in the short term, but industry analysts point out that an AWS outage can mean losses of millions of dollars per hour for companies that host e-commerce services, online games and educational platforms. The closest precedent, a similar outage in 2021, severely affected Netflix, Disney+, Tinder, and Amazon itself, and took more than six hours to fully resolve.
AWS, which serves more than a third of the global cloud computing market, is the invisible infrastructure behind thousands of applications and websites. Therefore, any failure in one of its key regions can generate a global domino effect. Cyberinfrastructure experts warn that these episodes highlight the growing dependence of the digital world on a very small number of providers.
"When a region like us-east-1 goes down, it's not just a technical problem; it's an earthquake for the entire digital ecosystem," said an analyst at Datacenter Dynamics, quoted by the British press. "Every time this happens, we’re reminded that the cloud isn't infallible and that we need to invest more in redundancy and diversification." At this time, AWS is still displaying the outage message and says that its teams are working to restore all services "as soon as possible." Until this happens, millions of users will continue to find that, without the cloud, much of global digital life grinds to a standstill.