Global Apps and Services Including Perplexity AI, Snapchat, and Canva Hit by AWS Outage

A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted several popular apps and online platforms across the globe on Monday. The disruption, which originated in the company’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, caused service failures in a range of applications, including Perplexity AI, Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Alexa, Ring, Canva, Duolingo, and even trading platforms like Robinhood and Venmo.

According to AWS’s official status page, the company experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services. 

The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 12:41 p.m. IST. In an update published at 1:21 p.m. IST. ET, Amazon said, “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”

The outage, which began early Monday morning in the US, led to thousands of user complaints being logged on monitoring sites such as Downdetector. According to the site, the outage started around 12:30 p.m. IST, with a surge in reports from users experiencing connection failures and login errors. Social media was flooded with posts from around the world about disruptions in smart-home devices, streaming services, and enterprise tools.

“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” confirmed Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas in a post on X, one of several tech leaders acknowledging the incident’s widespread impact. 

The outage affected several of AWS’s core offerings, including Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, and Global Accelerator, which are infrastructure components that many websites and apps depend on for hosting and data management. Even Amazon’s own internal applications reportedly faced slowdowns, highlighting how interconnected the company’s systems have become.