AWS took a nap at 3AM and took half the internet down with it

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Look who decided to take an unscheduled nap at 3:11 AM ET this morning—Amazon Web Services, the digital backbone that apparently holds up more of the internet than we’re comfortable admitting.

The carnage was swift and merciless. Amazon’s own services went dark first, followed by a who’s who of digital essentials:

Alexa stopped listening to your existential 3 AM questions, ChatGPT couldn’t generate your weird fan fiction, Snapchat users couldn’t send their regrettable drunk texts, and perhaps most tragically, the McDonald’s app couldn’t fulfill your McFlurry cravings.

Even Fortnite players got booted mid-battle royale, which honestly might have prevented more property damage than we realize.

A quick look at DownDetector shows exactly how many services went down and are still seeing issues because of the outage.

The chaos centered around AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, because of course it did. This particular server farm has become the internet’s most reliable unreliable friend, going down like clockwork every few years and taking civilization with it.

Perplexity’s CEO had to sheepishly confirm on X that yes, they were down too, joining the growing list of companies awkwardly explaining to users why their million-dollar cloud infrastructure suddenly resembled a potato.

Amazon started seeing “significant signs of recovery” by 5:27 AM ET, and by 6:35 AM, they claimed most services were “succeeding normally”—corporate speak for “we have no idea what happened, but it seems to be working now.”

The root cause? Still a mystery. But hey, at least we got a gentle reminder that the entire digital economy runs on like, three data centers in Virginia.

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.