From Fortnite to Alexa, Amazon’s AWS disruption causes global outage

Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was recovering on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally.

The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.

AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some impacted services after roughly three hours of disruptions, as systems gradually came back online.

“Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests,” it said in the latest update on the outage posted on its status page.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS competes with Google and Microsoft’s cloud services.