Amazon Web Services (AWS) is facing a widespread outage distributing major online services including Amazon, Alexa, BT and Perplexity AI, which claims the “root cause is an AWS issue” and is working on fixing it.
According to the AWS status page, multiple systems are “impacted” by operational problems, and the company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region”.
However, the disruptions are also affecting services in other regions around the world.
Meanwhile, Downdetector recorded more than 2,000 reports of AWS outages in the USA, with users noting difficulties accessing a variety of apps and digital services.
Alongside,the technology giant’s own ecosystem, BT, Sky and Vodafone have also been affected, Downdetector has claimed.
The AWS outage seems to be affecting several platforms hosted on its cloud network, with the cause of the problem has not yet been identified, with no timeline being released for when normal services will resume.
“Perplexity is down right now,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
The AWS dashboard initially reported problems in the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11 am. ET.
“We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said in an update posted at the time.
Meanwhile, a Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) spokesperson confirmed to Capacity, its network is operating as usual today, despite claims of the outage linked to AWS.
A lot of gaming sites are down and uber also affected.
A spokesperson for Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, urged users to “hang tight” as it investigated “issues”. Snapchat returned online shortly before 9pm.
About 50 per cent of on-demand content on Australian streaming service 9Now, owned by Nine, experienced playback issues during the outage, according to an internal incident alert. The incident was resolved at 9pm.
Telstra and Optus users also reported issues, though both telcos confirmed call services weren’t impacted by the outage. An Optus spokesperson said that data services reliant on the AWS cloud system experienced some disruptions, but that its network remained fully operational.