Amazon Web Services Inc. signage at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday, taking down numerous big-name websites.
AWS cited an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” in an update at 2:01 a.m. PDT. Over 70 of its own services are affected.
Shortly afterward, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery.”
“Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information,” it added.
By 3:03 a.m. PDT, some services had recovered. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share,” AWS said.
The website Downdetector[1] said that user reports indicated problems at sites including Amazon[2], Disney+[3], Lyft[4], the McDonald’s[5] app, the New York Times, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood,[6] Snapchat, T-Mobile[7], United Airlines[8], Venmo and Verizon[9].
British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs were also experiencing issues, per Downdetector.
A Government spokesperson told CNBC: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Lloyds Banking Group confirmed some of its services were affected and asked customers “to bear with us” while it works to bring them back online.
Some United and Delta customers reported on social media that they couldn’t find their reservations online, check in or drop bags[10].
Other social media users cited disruption across cloud-based games, including Roblox and Fortnite, while crypto exchange Coinbase said that many users were unable to access the service due to the outage.
Graphic design tool Canva said it was “experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva. There is a major issue with our underlying cloud provider.”
Generate AI search tool Perplexity is also affected. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
It’s not the first time major companies have been affected by a technical issue; in July 2024, a faulty software upgrade[11] by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike revealed just how fragile global technology infrastructure is when it caused Microsoft Windows systems to go dark, creating millions of dollars worth of chaos and grounding thousands of flights in the process. It also affected hospitals and banks.
— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.
References
- ^ Downdetector (downdetector.com)
- ^ Amazon (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ Disney+ (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ Lyft (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ McDonald’s (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ Robinhood, (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ T-Mobile (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ United Airlines (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ Verizon (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ check in or drop bags (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ faulty software upgrade (www.cnbc.com)