Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS, which provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to many companies, governments and individuals, was hit by an outage on Monday, affecting several popular websites and apps.
DownDetector, a platform that monitors internet services, said Amazon’s own shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all experiencing problems.
“Engineers responded immediately and are actively working to mitigate the issue and fully understand the root cause,” AWS said.
Shortly afterward, she said she was seeing “significant signs of improvement.”
“We continue to work through the backlog of queued requests,” it added.
Internet services affected by the disruption
The AWS outage is the largest Internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike failure, which paralyzed technical systems in hospitals, banks and airports around the world.
Websites and apps experiencing problems on Monday included AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood.
DownDetector also reported outages affecting gaming platforms including Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans. Financial apps like PayPal’s Venmo and Chime also faced problems. Uber rival Lyft was shut down for thousands of US users.
Snapchat, Duolingo and several banks have also reported problems.
More to follow.