AWS outages takes most of the internet with it — Zoom, Slack, and even Fortnite go down

Slack is down. Zoom is down. Even Wordle is down, so don't think about killing time with puzzle games while your remote team figures out why their critical platforms are broken. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the server platform behind hundreds of the Internet's most popular apps, services, and games, and reports on the official AWS Service health page confirm "increased error rates" responsible for a huge chunk of the web going down.

Some user-friendly dashboards, like Downdetector, show the same news, though early signs show that recoveries could be happening as the pings begin dropping — though it's more likely that fewer reports are coming in compared to previous hours.

Still, the apps listed at the top of their pages with the most reports expose how fragile some of the world's favorites are, since they rely on Amazon's web servers, as even fun apps like Snapchat and renowned video games like Fortnite bit the dust when AWS began suffering. Palworld is out, too, and it has nothing to do with Nintendo's legal team this time.

Somewhat comically, the gigantic social media platform Reddit also uses AWS, so common web searches for "why is [service] down reddit" can pull up errors and similarly dead pages — suffering the exact same fate.

Nevertheless, Amazon's engineers "were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause", so these downtimes will probably be over within a few hours, at least based on previous occurrences with AWS errors.

How long will AWS be down?

AWS is beginning to show signs of recovery as of 2:27 AM PDT. That's the "US-East-1 region" servers, but Amazon's support times are based on US PT.

We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.

Are any Microsoft services affected?

Microsoft's services, including Microsoft 365, Copilot, and other apps connected to Windows 11, generally run on its in-house Azure server platform. Since these servers are running on an entirely different network from AWS, any downtime would be coincidental. So far, everything is working fine.

Thankfully, the majority of Windows Central's operations are unaffected by any AWS downtime, except for a handful of conveniences that sometimes speed up our work. For now, you'll perhaps find that only your workplace is affected if you're a night owl in the United States, or if you're closer to Europe and rely on servers hosted in the US.

One standout, besides Slack, includes Grammarly — a spelling and grammar assistant available for Windows and mobile, which is also suffering downtime. Luckily, I only use it as a backup when writing, but as with similarly AI-driven apps like ChatGPT and Perplexity, the AWS outage killed its usefulness on this Monday morning. Used my brain instead.

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