Global network meltdown: ChatGPT, Amazon, and other top services go down
Popular services go down worldwide (photo: Getty Images)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing a major outage affecting dozens of popular online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and more, reports The Verge.
What is known
According to AWS's official status page, "operational issues" have affected several services, and the company is "investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region."
Reddit users report that the voice assistant Alexa has stopped responding to requests and executing commands. Some note that even pre-set alarms and routines are not working.
The outage also affected third-party platforms running on AWS's cloud infrastructure, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonald's app. The cause of the issues is not yet known, and there is no timeline for service restoration.
An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins. We're investigating this now, and will update you when we have more details.
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 20, 2025
"Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it," said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, on X (formerly Twitter).
According to the AWS status panel, the first reports of problems appeared at 11:10.
"We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share," Amazon stated.
Similar outages have occurred in 2023, 2021, and 2020. During those events, disruptions also caused widespread downtime across multiple websites and online platforms for several hours.
We also covered the recent ChatGPT outage, which temporarily made the AI unavailable worldwide.
Additionally, we have a detailed guide on what to do if ChatGPT or Gemini is not working and how to quickly restore their functionality.
