Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon, experienced a major technical outage on Monday, affecting large portions of the internet and bringing down widely used apps including Snapchat, Fortnite, and Alexa. The disruption began late in the afternoon, with users reporting connection failures and slow loading times across multiple platforms that rely on AWS infrastructure.

Amazon confirmed the incident in a status update, saying that most services have since been restored but that engineers were “continuing to investigate the root cause.” The company did not specify what triggered the failure but said systems were recovering steadily throughout the evening.

AWS is one of the world’s largest cloud service providers, powering websites and applications for governments, businesses, and consumers. Outages of this scale are rare but can cause widespread disruption due to the company’s central role in global digital infrastructure.

The outage affected not only consumer platforms but also corporate services that depend on AWS for hosting, data processing, and communications. Analysts noted that the event highlighted how dependent many global companies have become on a handful of cloud providers to keep digital operations running.

By Monday noon, South African time, Amazon said that all major systems were back online, though some users continued to experience intermittent connectivity issues.