AWS experienced a major outage earlier this year, primarily impacting its US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia data center). The disruption began in the early hours of a Monday and caused widespread service failures across the internet.
The outage led to high error rates and latency in critical AWS services such as EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and more. This ripple effect disrupted thousands of websites, apps, and platforms globally, including gaming, streaming, and enterprise systems.
AWS’s health dashboard reported that over 50 services were affected, with Amazon DynamoDB completely down during the peak of the outage.
While AWS did not disclose the exact root cause, officials confirmed there was no evidence of a cyberattack or external interference. Industry experts suggested the issue likely stemmed from network congestion, hardware failure, or configuration errors—common triggers for previous AWS incidents.
The outage affected major online services, including popular games like Fortnite, Rocket League, as well as numerous applications like Snapchat, Canva, and Perplexity. AWS restored services after several hours, but the incident highlighted the vulnerability of centralised cloud infrastructure.
