Amazon's AWS outage has knocked services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and more offline

On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the internet is dealing with a hangover. A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running. That includes a long list of popular software like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon's own assistant Alexa has been stuttering, and if you're wondering why the internet seems to be against you today — you're not imagining it.

According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services" in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had figured out that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of ...