A major outage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the cloud computing arm of Amazon — caused widespread disruption to several popular global web services and applications on Monday, including Canva, Snapchat, and Zoom, among others.
In a statement, AWS confirmed that the outage originated from its US East Coast region, one of its key data hubs, affecting multiple services and platforms that depend on its infrastructure.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause,” the company said in an operational update.
According to outage tracker Downdetector.com, high-profile platforms such as Roblox, Clash Royale, MyFitnessPal, Life360, Fortnite, Duolingo, Signal, Slack, Peloton, and Zoom also reported interruptions.
Other digital platforms like Coinbase, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, and even the London Stock Exchange Group’s data services were not spared.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI-powered search platform Perplexity, confirmed via X (formerly Twitter) that the company’s downtime was directly linked to the AWS outage.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” he wrote.
Design platform Canva, which boasts over 170 million monthly users, also acknowledged the disruption in a post on X:
“Our cloud provider is currently experiencing problems. It’s not the experience we want for you, and we’re working closely with them to help re-establish service. Thanks for your patience and understanding as we work to bring things back to normal,” the company said.
As of the time of reporting, there were no confirmed reports of the outage affecting Nigerian users.
AWS remains the global leader in cloud-computing services, powering critical systems for major corporations, mobile apps, and even government agencies worldwide. It provides on-demand access to computing power, data storage, artificial intelligence tools, and analytics — making its stability vital to the global digital ecosystem.
Industry experts warn that any disruption at AWS can create a ripple effect across multiple sectors, from fintech and gaming to social media and e-commerce.
While the scale and duration of the latest outage are still being assessed, early reports suggest that millions of users across various platforms were affected.