A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday disrupted dozens of websites and apps across New Zealand and around the world, affecting communication, financial, gaming, and media platforms.
Monitoring site Downdetector reported widespread connectivity issues, confirming that platforms including TVNZ, Spark, Facebook, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Ring, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Steam, MyFitnessPal, Duolingo, and Wordle were among those impacted.
In New Zealand, Sky acknowledged that its On Demand services were affected, linking the problem directly to the AWS outage. “There is currently an Amazon Web Services global issue that’s affecting On Demand viewing for New Sky Box, Sky Pod, Sky Go, and Neon customers,” the broadcaster said in a statement.
According to Reuters, AWS confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region, one of the company’s main data hubs. The company said it had identified a potential root cause late Monday night (NZ time) and was working on a fix.
AWS, which provides cloud computing, data storage, and networking services to companies worldwide, powers a large share of the internet’s infrastructure. Any disruption to its systems can trigger cascading outages across numerous websites and applications, from entertainment platforms to essential communication tools.
Among those hit were Amazon’s own services, including Prime Video and Alexa, along with several high-traffic gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans. Financial apps including Venmo and Chime also reported service interruptions.
In the United States, ride-share platform Lyft faced app downtime, while encrypted messaging app Signal confirmed that it, too, had been affected.
Tech companies Perplexity AI, Coinbase, and Robinhood attributed their temporary service disruptions to the AWS failure.
As of late Monday night, Amazon and AWS had not issued detailed statements on the cause of the outage or an estimated restoration timeline.
The widespread downtime highlights how dependent global digital infrastructure has become on a few major cloud service providers, and how a single technical glitch in one region can ripple across the world, affecting millions of users from New York to New Zealand.