Widespread AWS outage disrupts banks, apps and government sites, services now recovering

mazon Web Services experienced a significant outage today that rippled across finance, gaming, communications and public sector websites worldwide. Amazon reported increased error rates centered on its US East region, then said systems were showing strong signs of recovery by late afternoon Brisbane time. Most requests were beginning to succeed, although some backlogs remained.

Reports of problems surged from about 7.30 a.m. London time, according to third party monitors. Banks and financial platforms were among the first to flag issues, including Coinbase and Robinhood in the United States. The UK tax authority HMRC also experienced disruption. UK football club Tottenham Hotspur told fans its e ticketing platform was affected.

The outage hit a broad mix of consumer and workplace apps. Users reported trouble with Slack, Zoom and other collaboration tools. Gaming platforms including Fortnite and Roblox saw spikes in failure reports. Amazon’s own Alexa and Ring services also experienced problems.

AWS underpins a large share of the internet, which magnified the impact. Analysts attributed today’s cascading effects to problems in the Northern Virginia hub, known as US EAST 1. The episode highlights how tightly coupled digital services can amplify single vendor incidents, a risk illustrated by last year’s global outage linked to a faulty software update at a cybersecurity provider.

By early evening in Brisbane, Amazon said mitigation steps had produced significant recovery. Companies continued to work through residual issues while monitoring their status pages. Users were advised to retry transactions, check service dashboards and expect intermittent delays as systems clear queued requests.

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