Amazon Web Services (AWS) is recovering from a significant outage that affected online services worldwide on Monday. The disruption impacted various platforms, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and the Robinhood trading app, among others. Users reported issues on DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages.

The problems began around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time when AWS announced on its Health Dashboard that it was investigating increased error rates and latency in the US-EAST-1 Region. As the situation developed, AWS confirmed that there were significant error rates and that engineers were actively addressing the issue.

By approximately 6 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS reported that recovery was underway for most affected services. The company stated, "We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered," and added that it was working toward a full resolution.

AWS serves numerous high-profile clients, including governments, universities, and major corporations. Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in the U.K., noted the widespread reliance on a few major cloud computing companies. He explained, "So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum of online services."

Burgess emphasized the importance of cloud services in modern life, likening the internet to a utility. He stated, "The world now runs on the cloud," highlighting how users often cannot identify the source of issues because they interact with applications like Snapchat or Roblox rather than AWS directly.

He reassured users that such outages are typically resolved quickly and indicated that there was no evidence suggesting a cyberattack was responsible for the disruption. "This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue, something’s gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon," he said.

Burgess also mentioned that AWS, along with competitors like Google and Microsoft, has established processes for managing outages, which are usually resolved in hours rather than days. By around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS reported that most service operations were functioning normally again.

The incident underscores the critical role that cloud computing plays in the digital infrastructure of many services used daily by millions of people.