Amazon Web Services suffered a significant service disruption affecting more than 40 cloud services in its US-EAST-1 region early Monday morning, taking down multiple consumer platforms including Alexa, Ring, Snapchat and numerous other web services.
The outage, which AWS traced to DNS resolution problems with the DynamoDB API endpoint, began at 12:11 AM Pacific Daylight Time with increased error rates and latencies across multiple services. Engineers identified the potential root cause at 2:01 AM PDT as a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB APIs, with AWS working on multiple parallel recovery paths.
The disruption fully impacted Amazon DynamoDB whilst affecting 40 other AWS services, including Lambda, EC2, CloudFront, API Gateway, Elastic Kubernetes Service and IAM Identity Center. Global services relying on US-EAST-1 endpoints, including IAM updates and DynamoDB Global Tables, also experienced problems.
Customers were unable to create or update support cases through the AWS Support Centre or Support API during the incident. AWS recommended customers continue to retry any failed requests whilst engineers worked to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause.
The knock-on effects proved widespread, with Perplexity AI confirming on its status page that the platform experienced an outage caused by the AWS service disruption. The AI search platform first began investigating elevated error rates at 7:54 AM UK time before identifying the AWS disruption as the cause at 8:32 AM, stating it was actively working with AWS on a resolution as of 10:05 AM.
Multiple consumer web services, including Alexa, Ring and Snapchat, were also taken offline by the outage, alongside numerous other platforms relying on AWS infrastructure.
The US-EAST-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, is one of AWS’s largest and most heavily utilised regions, making outages particularly disruptive for enterprise customers and services built on the platform.
