AWS outage disrupts apps worldwide, affects DynamoDB and EC2

A widespread internet outage centered on Amazon Web Services disrupted dozens of popular apps, games and websites early Monday, leaving users around the world unable to access services including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and several Amazon-owned products. The problems began at about 8 a.m. in the United Kingdom, or midnight Pacific Time, and were linked to issues at AWS facilities in North Virginia, a major hub for global cloud infrastructure.

Amazon said on its service status page that it was investigating increased error rates and delays affecting multiple AWS services, specifically naming Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2. Those core services provide database storage and computing capacity that thousands of companies rent to run their applications, and their impairment has cascaded to clients that rely on them.

The outage was visible on outage-tracking platform DownDetector, which recorded large, simultaneous spikes in user-submitted reports for a wide array of platforms. In addition to social apps and games, affected services included Ring doorbells, Amazon.com, Amazon Music and Prime Video, Canva, Coinbase, Venmo and other finance and...