AWS Outage: What Broke, Who Was Affected, and What’s Next
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Key Points
- AWS reported significant connectivity/API errors (US-EAST-1) affecting EC2, DNS pathways, and managed data tiers.
- Millions of outage reports poured in; services showed recovery but saw periodic relapses.
- Disrupted services like Snapchat and Amazon for millions.
A cascading AWS issue centered on US-EAST-1 triggered widespread failures across compute, DNS resolution, and data services—leaving apps unable to “find” their own data. Recovery began, then wobbliness returned as systems repopulated caches and traffic surged. For users, that translated into frozen apps, broken logins, stalled payments, and error pages.
The fallout has been staggering, knocking out core digital services across multiple sectors, including Amazon's own retail and Prime Video operations, disrupting social media for millions of users on Snapchat, taking out gaming connectivity for Fortnite (Epic Games), stopping the stream of entertainment on Disney+, and paralyzing crucial financial transactions at major institutions like Capital One, demonstrating yet again the extreme reliance of the world's digital infrastructure on a single point of failure.
The breadth of disruption underscores how tightly the digital economy leans on a few cloud regions. When a shared dependency hiccups, the blast radius spans banks, airlines, streaming, gaming, retail, and workplace tools in minutes. The lesson isn’t to abandon cloud—it’s to engineer for detours and rehearse real failovers.
Major Companies that Were Affected:
- Amazon
- Snapchat
- Google (services)
- Brand Vision
- Canva
- Roku
- Disney (Disney+)
- Capital One
- NFL service,
- Delta Air Lines
- Fortnite (Epic)
- PlayStation Network
