Huge swathes of the internet were taken offline on Monday after an outage at an Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia that hosts millions of apps and websites. Dozens of the world’s most popular apps and online services, including Snapchat, Zoom, ChatGPT, Duolingo, Roblox, PlayStation Network, Prime Video, and many others reported “significant error rates for requests,” resulting in widespread outages. Ring doorbell customers also reported being unable to use their video doorbells, while consumer and banking apps were also down. Downdetector, which monitors website outages, told the BBC it has received four million reports of platforms being offline on Monday morning—more than double the 1.8 million reports it typically receives on an average weekday. Amazon released a statement at around 5.30 a.m. ET saying, “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.” Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, appear to be unaffected by the outages. Elon Musk also said that his social media platform, X, was unaffected.
