Amazon Down: Prime Video, Alexa, and More Suffer Widespread Outages

Amazon Down: An ongoing outage in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) has shaken the internet world. Thousands of complaints are being reported on DownDetector, while AWS's health dashboard confirms increased error rates and latencies across many services. The issue began at 12:51 AM PDT (approximately 1:21 AM IST) and has not yet been resolved. AWS is investigating, but the next update is expected in 30-45 minutes—no estimated recovery time has been provided. Experts speculate it may be related to a DNS bug or configuration issue.

This outage is affecting approximately one-third of internet services dependent on AWS, including gaming, streaming, finance, and social media. Like previous similar incidents (such as the 2021 outage), it could last for hours but is expected to be resolved soon.

AWS's official update

AWS's status page clarified: "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for several AWS services in the US-East-1 region. This may also impact applications and services hosted on AWS." The affected services include EC2 (cloud computing) and DynamoDB (database). The company said teams are working to address the issue, but no clear cause or timeline was shared.

Affected services & apps

The outage is causing high-impact website loading failures and checkout errors on Amazon.com (over 5,000 reports in the last hour), severely impacting shopping. Reports of streaming interruptions and app crashes are high for Prime Video, particularly frustrating for fans of shows like Star Trek. Alexa users are experiencing unresponsive voice commands and glitches in smart homes, a high-impact issue that can completely disrupt home automation. Snapchat is experiencing high-impact issues (tens of thousands of global reports) with feeds and messages not loading, although alternative apps like WhatsApp can be used. Fortnite (Epic Games) game servers are down, causing login failures, which is high-impact and a major setback for gamers. Robinhood's trading app is down and login issues are moderate, impacting stock trading. Perplexity AI has a high level of chatbot query timeouts and complete outages, with the CEO explicitly pointing to AWS as the root cause.

User reactions on X 

Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas wrote, "Perplexity is currently down. The root cause is an AWS issue. We are working on a solution." Another user said, “AWS US-East is down; EC2 and DynamoDB are affected. Everything is crashing!” A Star Trek fan complained, “Prime Video is dead; I just wanted to watch an episode.” Many suspected a DNS bug.