No Amazon, No Snapchat, No Alexa… What Happened?

It started as just another Monday—or at least that’s what everyone thought. But when people began waking up across the U.S., they discovered something alarming: the internet wasn’t working.

No Amazon shopping, no checking Snapchat streaks, no asking Alexa if you need a jacket today, and smart homes that suddenly refused to listen. For millions, the digital world had ground to a halt.

The outage reportedly began around midnight Pacific, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported “increased error rates” on its core U.S.–East servers. This “operational issue” in AWS’s northern Virginia data center affected 14 different services, causing ripple effects across the internet.

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Cloud-based games like Roblox and Fortnite were down. Social media platforms, including Snapchat, experienced disruptions. Millions of Amazon shoppers were temporarily locked out of Amazon.com and Prime Video, while Ring doorbells went silent.

Even media giants like Disney and The New York Times reported issues, highlighting just how much of the web runs on AWS infrastructure.

AWS later pointed to problems with the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 region as a potential root cause. By 5:30 a.m. EST, the company reported “significant signs of recovery,” slowly bringing services back online.

The outage serves as a stark reminder of how dependent we’ve become on the cloud. Gaming, social media, shopping, streaming, even basic home functions rely on a network most of us never see. When one major center goes down, it can feel like the entire digital world stops.

Thankfully, the outage was while most of us were sleeping, and it was fixed before we woke up.