Chaos in the Cloud: How a Massive Amazon Server Outage Disrupted Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and Beyond

This morning, a significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage impacted various online platforms, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, and more. While some services like Fortnite and Epic Games Store have reported full recovery, others are still experiencing issues.

The problem was first detected in the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11 AM ET, with AWS noting that the “underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated.” According to Amazon, the root cause was identified within the EC2 internal network, with updates provided until 12:13 PM ET.

Additional steps have been taken to aid recovery of the internal subsystem responsible for network load balancer monitoring, resulting in connectivity and API restoration for AWS services. Mitigation measures are also being applied to address throttling issues. Further updates are expected.

Reports from Reddit users highlighted problems with Alexa and Ring security cameras, while personal experiences reflected the widespread impact of the outage. The recurring AWS outages in the US-East-1 region have caused disruptions across multiple years.

Numerous platforms and services, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, Zapier, and the McDonalds app, were affected by the AWS issue, underscoring the widespread nature of the incident.

Update, October 20th: Latest status updates from Amazon have been included.