As Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a massive global outage on Monday, disrupting a wide range of popular websites and apps across the world, billionaire Elon Musk took a swipe at the tech giant – promoting his own messaging platform, X chat, as a safer, independent alternative.
“The messages (on X chat) are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk posted on X. “You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls,” he added.
The outage at AWS, Amazon’s powerful cloud services arm, brought down major platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Robinhood, Coinbase, Perplexity AI, and Duolingo. Amazon’s own services – Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa – also reported connectivity problems, according to monitoring site Downdetector.
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In a statement on its status page, AWS said it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services and that engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” The company traced the issue to a critical infrastructure zone in its US-East-1 region in Virginia, one of the largest cloud hubs in the world.
The disruption marks the first major internet outage since the CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024, which crippled hospitals, banks, and airports globally.
AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and other digital services for companies, governments, and individuals. Because it underpins much of the global internet – accounting for about one-third of the cloud market – any outage can have sweeping ripple effects. AWS competes directly with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Among those affected, AI startup Perplexity, crypto exchange Coinbase, and trading platform Robinhood said their services were impacted due to AWS issues. “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X.
Gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans also faced downtime, while Venmo, Chime, and Lyft were among the financial and ride-sharing apps hit by the outage. Messaging service Signal confirmed that its systems were also affected, with President Meredith Whittaker acknowledging the disruption on X.
The outage extended beyond the US – in Britain, major banks such as Lloyds and Bank of Scotland, along with telecom providers Vodafone and BT, reported issues. Even the UK’s tax authority HMRC experienced disruptions on its website, according to Downdetector’s UK tracker.
Amid the chaos, Musk noted that his own platform remained unaffected. Posting a short update, he wrote simply: “X works.”
