Amazon Web Services outage causes service disruptions from Alexa to Venmo to the McDonald’s app

Do a bunch of your apps seem like they decided to call in sick today? 

That’s because they did. From Venmo to Disney+ to the McDonald’s app, outages are currently plaguing multiple services across the internet. The Downdetector home page is a sea of red spikes, all indicating service disruptions occurring around the same time. (Editor’s note: Downdetector is owned by Mashable’s parent company, Ziff Davis).

The internet is struggling.
Credit: Screenshot: Downdetector

These apps and websites have something in common that is apparently affecting them all: They rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store their data and/or provide computing power. AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing business, the largest business of its kind (followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud). So when AWS breaks, pretty much everything breaks, too.

Amazon acknowledged the outage shortly after the Associated Press reported that users were experiencing trouble. Amazon issued a statement saying that it was “actively working towards recovery.”

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Basically, they’re working on it. But don’t bother Alexa right now.