Web partially paralyzed Thousands of websites report massive disruption

Numerous online services were temporarily offline on Monday morning. The reason is a severe outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which paralyzed several global platforms - from Snapchat to Fortnite.

On Monday morning, there were massive disruptions to numerous online services. Among those affected were Snapchat, Duolingo, the design platform Canva and popular online games such as Fortnite, Roblox, Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. The disruption has since been rectified.

As can be seen on the disruption platforms Allestörungen.at and downdetector.com, user reports increased within a few minutes. Many reported the error code 503 - server error, which indicates that the cloud server cannot be reached.

Exact cause still unclear

The trigger: problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world's largest cloud providers. On the official AWS status page, the company confirmed a "technical issue" at the Northern Virginia site (us-east-1). Several services were affected, including storage and computing resources used by third-party providers.

Companies worldwide are responding: Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI platform Perplexity, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that his service was also "currently offline due to the AWS issues".

The exact cause is still unclear. AWS announced that it was "working hard to restore the systems". According to initial user reports, some services could be accessed again around midday - in some cases with restrictions.

The blue News video service was also affected by the outage. No videos could be played on the site. The editorial team would like to thank you for your understanding.