Amazon server outage in the US causes a knock-on effect with apps failing around the world

Amazon has suffered a major outage this Monday (20 October) after a reported failure at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud infrastructure platform that hosts 32% of the internet according to Statista. This problem, which began in the United States, has affected many of the world's regions and left a lot of applications that required the servers to function properly offline. In Spain the consequences were not as severe as in the United States, where a large number of services cannot be accessed.

The most affected are consumers of video games, who are unable to access those operated by Supercell, Clash Royale or Clash of Clans, with millions of players around the world. Roblox or Fortnite are not work either, going deeper into this sector. There are also multiple tools used for everyday work that do not work, such as Canva or Perplexity. When trying to access any of these, a message pops up saying: "There is a problem on our end. In order to help you faster, please contact our support team.

Amazon's main services, such as its own website for ordering products, its OTT platform - Prime Video - and Alexa, are also affected in some markets. The official AWS service status panel does offer updated information on what is happening. It seems to indicate that there is a problem in the US-EAST-1 region, hosted in Virginia, but that a solution is being worked on.

"We are observing the impact on several AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tools, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working to recover the services," the cloud hosting company explained.