An outage in Amazon Web Services is currently disrupting a wide range of services, including Amazon Alexa, Fortnite, and the AI search engine Perplexity.
The issue, which began shortly after midnight Pacific Time on October 20, is causing elevated error rates and increased latency across at least 21 AWS services, with key components like Amazon DynamoDB experiencing a full disruption.
According to the official AWS Health Dashboard, the incident was first detected at 12:11 AM PDT, with engineers quickly initiating an investigation into the root cause. By 12:51 AM, AWS confirmed that multiple services were affected and that the disruption could hinder even basic operations, such as creating support cases via the AWS Support Center or API. As of the latest update, AWS is still working on mitigation while further analysis is underway.
The outage appears to stem from issues in the US-EAST-1 region, which is one of AWS’s most critical and densely used data center hubs. This region powers a substantial share of North American traffic and infrastructure, and disruptions here often cascade into widespread service degradation for both consumer-facing and enterprise applications.
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Among the most visible impacts is the breakdown of Amazon Alexa functionality. Users have taken to Reddit to report their Alexa devices responding with messages like “Sorry, the internet isn’t reachable.” Many described being unable to control smart home devices, set alarms, or interact with the Alexa app. Reports indicate Alexa voice services and app logins are failing, with some users stuck in CAPTCHA loops or locked out entirely.
In parallel, Fortnite’s official status account acknowledged on X that login services were being affected by a broader internet outage tied to AWS. The Epic Games title relies on AWS for parts of its backend infrastructure, including authentication and matchmaking services. The login issues are preventing many players from accessing the game.
AI startup Perplexity, a fast-growing alternative to traditional search engines, also confirmed downtime via a tweet from CEO Aravind Srinivas, citing AWS as the root cause. The platform, known for generating AI-powered answers in real time, relies heavily on AWS compute and data services to operate.
Additional AWS services currently impacted include:
- Amazon CloudFront (content delivery)
- Amazon EC2 (compute)
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
- AWS IAM Identity Center
- AWS Systems Manager
Amazon DynamoDB is the only service listed as outright “disrupted” rather than merely “impacted,” which may explain the widespread authentication failures and service coordination breakdowns across various platforms.
As of writing, Amazon has not provided an estimate for backend services restoration.
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