The outage, which originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, began in the early hours of Monday and quickly spread beyond the United States, affecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

According to AWS’s own status dashboard, multiple services are currently “impacted” due to “increased error rates and latencies,” with engineers “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”

For users, the impact has been immediate and widespread. Alexa devices have gone silent, unable to respond to voice commands or execute daily routines like alarms and reminders. 

Developers and businesses using AWS’s cloud network, from Airtable to Perplexity AI and the McDonald’s app, have also been hit. Even high-traffic entertainment platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Rainbow Six Siege are offline.

Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, has logged over 2,000 incident reports in the U.S. alone since the outage began. On Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), frustrated users across time zones have shared screenshots of failed connections and frozen dashboards.

“Perplexity is down right now,” confirmed Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, in a post on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

Amazon, in its latest public update at 3:51 a.m. ET, noted that it would provide further information every 45 minutes “or sooner if we have additional information to share.” However, at the time of writing, there is still no estimated timeline for full restoration.

This isn’t the first time AWS’s US-EAST-1 region has been the source of widespread disruption. Similar outages in December 2021, November 2020, and June 2023 took down high-profile platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Slack, Zoom, and Twitch. 

Each incident revealed an issue across the tech industry, that a large portion of the global internet depends heavily on a single cloud provider’s regional infrastructure.

The current outage appears to have hit both consumer-facing apps and backend systems, including AWS’s own Support Center and Support API, which organisations rely on for case creation and troubleshooting.

While AWS has reiterated that engineers are investigating the problem, the lack of transparency about the specific cause of the outage is driving industry-wide anxiety. Many are now revisiting familiar cases of how much centralisation is too much when the internet’s backbone depends on just a handful of companies.

For now, millions of users are in a holding pattern, waiting, refreshing, and hoping their devices come back online soon.

Reports of the disruption flooded in from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world, making it one of the highest service failures the platform has faced in recent times.

According to data from Downdetector, an outage-monitoring service that aggregates reports from multiple sources, over 21,000 users in the U.S. and more than 10,800 in the U.K. reported issues with X. 

The disruption, which reportedly began around 9:30 WAT (8:30 AM CET), caused users to encounter error messages such as “Something went wrong, try reloading.”

While some users experienced a complete inability to access the platform, others reported that the site was slow, with posts failing to load or refresh. The outage lasted approximately 45 minutes in some regions before gradual restoration, though intermittent issues continued for others.

With no immediate response from X, users turned to alternative social media platforms such as Facebook and Reddit to confirm the outage and discuss its impact. Many were upset, with memes and complaints quickly spreading across digital spaces.

One user wrote, “Can’t believe I had to come to Facebook just to check if X is down. What is happening?” Another joked, “Elon must be rebooting the servers manually.”

The reaction showed X’s role as a primary source of real-time conversations, with many users relying on it for news updates, business engagements, and entertainment.

As of the time of this report, X has not issued an official statement explaining the cause of the outage or providing a timeline for full restoration. The company also did not respond to media inquiries regarding the disruption.

While outages of this scale are uncommon, they can have huge impacts, particularly for businesses and content creators who rely on the platform for engagement. 

X has not experienced a major disruption of this magnitude in recent times and users are advised to monitor official channels for further updates.