How the AWS Outage Hit People, From Alexa Issues to Missed Starbucks

If you weren’t able to order your Starbucks this morning or access Wordle, you weren’t alone.

An Amazon Web Services outage this morning took down a slew of online services. It delayed Starbucks orders, Reddit scrolls — and yes, work Slack messages.

AWS’ cloud services provide a backbone for many internet companies. On Monday morning, the company experienced a widespread outage, listing over 80 affected services on the status page for Amazon’s cloud unit.

While Amazon said the underlying issue had been been “fully mitigated” earlier on Monday, outage reports spiked for US users on outage-tracking website DownDetector later in the morning as AWS continued to battle the issue.

Whether it was on their phone, laptop, or smart device, many consumers experienced the outage firsthand, from Alexa issues to fears of lost Snapchat streaks.

Morning alarm issues, security concerns, and trading pauses

Home security and smart alarms were an early sign. For Alexa users, some woke up to their device acting up — and others said issues accessing their smart lights or rain sounds meant they couldn’t fall asleep at all.

“I just had to get out of bed to unplug my alexa because it wouldn’t stop my alarm no matter how many times I shouted at it,” wrote one X user at 5:14 a.m. ET. “Most effective alarm I’ve ever set honestly.”

“My amazon alexa alarm has been going off for 30 minutes. Just wanted to nap a little longer,” another wrote.

Some Ring camera users also posted that their systems were down, heightening the sense of anxiety.

Umesh Khanna, the 28-year-old organizer of Forward Deployed Angels in San Francisco, arrived home late at night to find his apartment dark.

“A part of me thought I got hacked,” Khanna said. “Alexa wasn’t working, therefore I can’t turn on any lights, therefore I used my phone to get into our room.”

Over the phone, Khanna tried once again. Both his commands for Alexa to turn on the lights and open the blinds failed.

Small business owners walked in to find their booking systems down. Zoom callers found their meetings shut down. Apps for gig work platforms like Instacart and Lyft experienced issues.

For day-traders and market-watchers, the event was jarring. Some users said they were unable to access their Webull and Robinhood accounts. Others took to social media after they found they couldn’t load their Coinbase wallets or their sports betting profiles.

Khanna said that he would’ve shorted Robinhood’s stock, but he couldn’t because Robinhood was down.

The AWS outage also interrupted the workday for many corporate employees. Some engineers found that their vibe-coding tools, like Cursor and Vercel, weren’t working. Some couldn’t access Slack, while others complained that the rival Microsoft Teams didn’t suffer the same fate.

A life without Snapchat and Fortnite

The outage hit gaming hard.

People reported that Fortnite and Clash Royale were down. Roblox too. For Wordle players, many found themselves unable to log in, which caused some streak recovery worries.

Streaks were also an issue for Snapchat users, many of whom couldn’t access the platform. “Snapchat is planning to end my Streak of 1,090 DAYS. It will be bloody,” one X user posted with a “Joker” GIF.

Many social media sites were affected. Users found that they couldn’t save recipes on Pinterest or scroll their favorite Reddit message boards. AI friends even went down, as Character.AI faced an outage.

While its competitors went down, Elon Musk posted that X was still working.

The run tracker Strava also faced issues. Alex Predhome, a 31-year-old operations worker from Somerville, Mass., was scrolling the site on his desktop when he noticed his feed wouldn’t load properly.

Predhome was going to run in the morning, but said he decided against it: “I’ll just circle back to it in the afternoon, when Strava in theory might be back on,” he told Business Insider.

Many people on the East Coast of the United States woke up to the outage, which interrupted a crucial part of their morning: coffee.

“The Starbucks app is down and now I have to go in and order like a peasant,” one X user wrote.