Northern Virginia data center failure cascades worldwide, affecting millions
A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted internet access for millions of users globally today, taking down major websites and applications including Fortnite, Snapchat, and Amazon’s own platforms.
The incident began this morning in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, one of the company’s most critical data centers. What started as a localized problem quickly cascaded across multiple cloud services worldwide. AWS acknowledged the disruption on its status page, reporting “increased error rates and latencies.”
Engineers identified the root cause as a DNS resolution failure affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint in the affected region. The Domain Name System acts as the internet’s address book, translating website names into computer-readable addresses.
The outage impacted a broad spectrum of services. Gaming platforms Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans went offline, while financial services including Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and PayPal experienced disruptions. Amazon’s own properties—including its retail website, Prime Video, and Alexa—also suffered connectivity problems. Additionally, messaging service Signal and ride-sharing platform Lyft confirmed service interruptions.
The incident underscores growing concerns about the internet’s dependence on a handful of major cloud providers. AWS teams are working to fully restore all affected services.