NEW DELHI, INDIA: A massive, global outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud provider, brought a wide range of popular websites and apps to a grinding halt across India on Monday, underscoring the country’s deep reliance on international cloud infrastructure.
The disruption began around 12:30 pm IST, stemming from a failure in the critical US-East-1 region in northern Virginia—a core hub for global internet traffic. Within the first hour, over 15,000 user reports flooded outage tracker Downdetector worldwide, with more than 1,000 originating from India alone.
The cloud failure triggered service errors and high latency across Amazon’s core systems, including DynamoDB, EC2, and the Support API, immediately crippling Indian digital services.
Productivity & Education: Users of design application Canva in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru reported being unable to edit or export projects. Educational app Duolingo was also among the worst affected.
Gaming & Social: Gamers were unable to connect to servers for titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Clash Royale. Snapchat experienced intermittent crashes affecting messaging and stories.
News & Commerce: Content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress and Quintype were affected, impeding the publication of news on major websites. Amazon’s own services, including Prime Video and Amazon Music, suffered from buffering issues.
Indian Startups & Telecom: Indian digital service providers, including firms like Perplexity AI, Robinhood, and Coinbase, confirmed service downtime. Even Vodafone India’s online portals reported slow-loading pages due to their dependence on AWS-hosted services.
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas took to X (formerly Twitter) to confirm the issue, stating, “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
Warning on Cloud Dependency
Amazon’s cloud status page confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” and stated that engineers were “actively working to mitigate the problem.” Partial service restoration began by evening, but many users continued to experience delays.
The widespread collapse drew immediate attention to the concentration of India’s booming digital economy on a few international service providers.
“When a core AWS region experiences disruption, the ripple effects are felt instantly by Indian enterprises and consumers alike,” commented telecom analyst Rajiv Khanna. The outage serves as a stark reminder of the risks associated with the country’s heavy reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure for services that collectively serve millions daily—from fintech to streaming platforms.