Massive AWS outage disrupts Prime Video, Alexa, Snapchat

A major outage at Amazon Web Services took parts of the internet offline, causing disruptions to Amazon Prime Video, Alexa smart home features, and popular consumer apps like Snapchat, Roblox, Lyft, and more. Complaints leaped on Downdetector as users throughout the United States and even overseas witnessed logins crumble, streams stagger, and devices cease to respond. AWS confirmed the event on its Service Health Dashboard, writing that engineers were investigating and had a “list of possible root causes” before work started to restore stability in the affected systems.

What we know so far about the AWS outage

Early indications suggested that there was a general AWS backbone problem, resulting in errors across the board rather than being localized. Several services were impacted, and remediation was in progress, according to the AWS status page. Outage monitoring from Downdetector, meanwhile, indicated simultaneous spikes in reports across a cluster of household-name apps, the traditional calling card of cloud infrastructure woe as opposed to app-specific snafus.

Importantly, the whole shebang didn’t go fully dark. Performance was degraded, and some platforms became unavailable from time to time. Reddit blamed issues within its own systems at the time of the cloud problem, while Slack pointed to an upstream provider causing ongoing latency but leaving the service operational for most users. That combination of partial interruption and slow recovery is standard when cloud teams reroute traffic, revert changes, or throttle nonessential workloads to preserve core functions.

Services impacted across apps, streaming, and devices

Consumer-facing brands felt the most acute effects. Users reported trouble using Snapchat, Amazon retail and Prime Video, Alexa voice services, Ring, Roblox, Robinhood, Venmo, and Lyft; several popular streaming apps including Disney+, Hulu, and Max were also cited. Users identified gaming platforms like Fortnite and Steam, communication apps like Signal, and media and device ecosystems including Roku. IMDb, Amazon Music, AT&T, MyFitnessPal, and air travel sites run by airlines like United Airlines all contributed to a flood of reports collected by Downdetector.

The specific issues varied by region and account. Some users said they could stream but not sign in, while others who were already logged in said they were unable to browse, purchase, or connect. Smart device users reported lag or failed responses when commands were issued. Those asymmetries reveal how AWS regions, availability zones, and dependencies among services interact under pressure.

Why AWS outages can spread so far across the internet

Amazon and its AWS unit power a significant amount of the world’s digital infrastructure. Analysts from research firms such as Synergy Research and Canalys routinely put AWS at about one third of worldwide cloud infrastructure spend. That footprint exacerbates the blast radius when foundational services stumble, in particular identity, networking, and storage layers that underlie thousands of customer applications.

If previous incidents at cloud providers were any indication, what most likely starts to fail first are control planes and supporting services like internal DNS, authentication, or traffic management APIs. Even if customer compute is still up and running, failures in those shared components can prevent new instances from launching, logins from working, or services from connecting to each other. The net result appears as app outages to end users, but the bottleneck is an upstream platform dependency.

Business and consumer impacts from the AWS infrastructure outage

For consumers, the symptoms are clear: streaming shows stall, ride-hailing apps hang, and smart speakers powered by artificial intelligence clash against virtual assistants that exist only in the cloud. For businesses, the costs rack up in the background from abandoned carts, missed ad impressions, delayed payments, and support volumes that surge when customers hit “retry” together. Industries such as financial services and gaming are particularly prone to latency and session continuity, where small breaks result in cascading retries, which continue to escalate the strain on systems.

Operations teams usually react by enabling maintenance banners, rate-limiting lookups and traffic that isn’t essential, and moving the amount of work possible to a healthy region. Some businesses operate active-active architectures or run key functions on different cloud providers, but full-scale failover among multiple clouds is complicated and remains rare.

What users can do right now during the AWS outage

To improve your chances of access and reduce unnecessary load, consider the following steps:

• Avoid repeatedly retrying apps or devices that are failing to load, which can worsen traffic spikes.
• Check official status pages for both the affected service and AWS for real-time updates.
• Try an alternate path: use cellular data instead of Wi‑Fi, or a web version instead of a native app.
• For smart home devices, use local network controls where possible until cloud connectivity returns.

If you’re on a team that runs on AWS, prioritize stability and communication:

• Prioritize customer-facing endpoints and turn off noncritical batch jobs.
• Closely monitor authentication and DNS metrics, along with control plane health.
• Publish clear user messaging to reduce support load.
• Stage a post-mortem to verify regional failover, dependency mapping, and rate-limit policies.

What to watch next as AWS explains causes and fixes

AWS usually publishes a post-mortem of the root cause and corrective actions once systems stabilize. Stay tuned for more information about which regions and services were affected, and whether the problem was related to identity, networking, or traffic management. Expect downstream companies to publish their own summaries as they assess resilience plans and dependency footprints.

The larger point remains the same: as cloud risk accumulates, so does systemic risk. Outages like this serve as a reminder for businesses to audit single points of failure, rehearse failover paths, and ensure customer experiences degrade gracefully when an underpinning provider stumbles.