Coinbase, Fortnite among services hit by global outage of Amazon’s cloud unit

AMAZON’S cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday (Oct 20), causing connectivity issues for many companies around the world and disrupting services for several popular websites and apps including Fortnite and Snapchat.

“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said in an update on its status page.

AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS.

“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.

AWS and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon’s shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector.

Fortnite (owned by Epic Games), Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the games that were down, while Paypal’s Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said.

Uber rival Lyft’s app was also down for thousands of users in the US.

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Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.