Major AWS outage took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more
In a significant disruption that reverberated across the digital landscape, a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) occurred early this morning, affecting a multitude of popular online services for several hours. The outage, which began around 3:11 AM ET, primarily impacted the US-EAST-1 region, leading to connectivity issues for platforms such as Amazon itself, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and the Epic Games Store. While some services, including Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, managed to recover quickly, others continued to experience issues long after the initial reports surfaced. The AWS dashboard confirmed the problem stemmed from a DNS issue within its EC2 internal network, which was finally mitigated by 12:13 PM ET.
Users across various platforms reported significant disruptions. For instance, many Alexa users found their smart assistants unresponsive, unable to fulfill requests or answer queries. Some even experienced glitches with Amazon’s Ring security cameras, which failed to record properly during the outage. Personal anecdotes from users highlighted the widespread impact, with one user recounting how their morning alarm, set through Alexa, was stuck in a loop, unable to connect to the internet. This event underscores the reliance on AWS for a vast array of services, as similar outages in the past have caused significant disruptions, notably in 2020, 2021, and 2023.
As of the latest updates from Amazon, additional mitigation steps were being implemented to aid the recovery of the affected services. The company noted that they were working to restore connectivity and API functionalities across AWS services, with updates expected to continue throughout the day. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in relying on centralized cloud services, as outages can ripple through the digital ecosystem, affecting everything from gaming platforms to essential smart home devices. As recovery efforts continue, many users are left reflecting on their dependency on these technologies and the potential ramifications of such outages in an increasingly interconnected world.
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Here are just a few of the services impacted by the outage. | Image:
Downdetector
A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for several hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat,
Fortnite
,
ChatGPT
,
Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services
, and more. Some of the impacted platforms, including
Fortnite
,
Epic Games Store
, and
Perplexity
had announced that they are fully recovered and back online earlier this morning, while others are still having issues.
The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET, and eventually said that “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated.” According to Amazon’s
latest notes
, “the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network,” and the most recent update was published at 12:13PM ET:
We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services. We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT.
Users on Reddit
reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and others experienced gaps in recording for Amazon’s Ring security cameras. The outage even took out my alarm this morning — the weekday routine for Alexa to sound an alert on my Echo Dot was stuck in a loop saying it couldn’t connect to the internet. Once I eventually woke up, I found out about today’s massive outage just like many of you.
AWS outages in the widely-used US-East-1 region created widespread disruptions in
2020
,
2021
, and
2023
, forcing many major services offline before regular service was restored.
The AWS issue impacted many platforms and services running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, Zapier, and the McDonalds app.
âś… Service issues are resolved! Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services are fully recovered and have all returned to normal.
We’ll continue to monitor this to ensure everything remains stable.
https://t.co/hlMUy2jDas
— EOS Status (@EOSStatus)
October 20, 2025
Update, October 20th:
Added status updates from Amazon.
