A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has disrupted numerous online platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Fortnite, and AI search engine Perplexity, affecting millions of users worldwide.

The disruption began shortly after midnight Pacific Time on October 20 and has caused elevated error rates and latency across at least 21 AWS services. Among the most heavily impacted systems is Amazon DynamoDB, which has suffered a full outage.

Figure 1. AWS Outage.

According to the AWS Health Dashboard, the issue was first detected at 12:11 AM PDT, prompting engineers to launch an immediate investigation. By 12:51 AM, AWS confirmed that multiple services were affected, warning that even basic operations—such as submitting support requests through the AWS Support Center—might be hindered. Engineers continue to work on mitigation efforts as analysis of the root cause progresses.

The outage appears to be centered in the US-EAST-1 region, one of AWS’s largest and most critical data center hubs. Because this region supports a vast portion of North American traffic, disruptions there often trigger widespread cascading failures across consumer and enterprise services. Figure 1 shows AWS Outage.

Alexa has been one of the most visibly affected services. Users flooded Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) with reports of devices responding, “Sorry, the internet isn’t reachable,” while others were unable to control smart home devices, set alarms, or access the Alexa app [1]. Many also reported login failures and CAPTCHA loops.

Fortnite was similarly impacted. Epic Games confirmed on X that login and matchmaking services were down due to the AWS outage, preventing many players from accessing the game.

AI company Perplexity also experienced downtime, with CEO Aravind Srinivas confirming on X that AWS issues had disrupted their AI-driven search platform, which relies on AWS for compute and data processing.

Other affected AWS services include CloudFront, EC2, EKS, Kinesis Data Streams, IAM Identity Center, and Systems Manager. DynamoDB remains the only service listed as “disrupted” rather than “degraded,” a likely cause of the widespread authentication and coordination failures impacting numerous dependent applications.

References:

1. https://cyberinsider.com/widespread-aws-outage-disrupts-alexa-fortnite-and-many-more/

Cite this article:

Keerthana S (2025), Massive AWS Outage Knocks Out Alexa, Fortnite, and Other Major Services, AnaTechMaz, pp.167