Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud provider, suffered a widespread disruption on Oct 20 morning that degraded services for several companies, including artificial intelligence company Perplexity and the Coinbase and Robinhood financial platforms.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Amazon.com Inc. said on the AWS health dashboard. User complaints began spiking just after 7:30 a.m. London time, with data from Down Detector showing thousands of user reports.
Amazon’s cloud service is the most popular cloud provider globally, underpinning a large chunk of the internet. It accounts for about a third of the cloud market, meaning any outage has major ripple effects.
Coinbase and Robinhood said that the AWS issue was affecting their services and Perplexity said the disruption had impacted the stability of its website. Other sites, including game sites Roblox and Fortnite and corporate messaging service Slack also had a spike in complaints about service disruptions that might be related to AWS, according to data from Down Detector.
A representative for Amazon said the company was still investigating the outage and didn’t comment further when contacted by Bloomberg.
