Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing a major service outage, meaning globally popular apps and services such as Snapchat, Amazon Alexa, Fortnite and Duolingo have reportedly stopped working.

AWS’s online status checker is reporting an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services”.

“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region”, it reports.

“This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well.”

A specific Amazon facility in northern Virginia is said to be the root of the issues.

Other platforms reportedly affected by the outage, according to monitoring website Down Detector, include Ring, Roblox, Clash Royale, Life360, My Fitness Pal, Xero, Canva, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Music, Prime Video, Clash of Clans, Wordle, Coinbase, HMRC, Vodafone, PlayStation, and Pokémon Go.

So, why does one service owned by Amazon going down affect such a major chunk of online apps and services?

AWS is an Amazon-owned cloud computing platform that provides IT services for business customers. It’s a go-to supplier of website hosting, data storage, compute power and AI tools that companies purchase in order to run their websites, apps and services at a global scale.

Rather than owning their own servers, physical computer equipment that they would have to store and maintain, cloud services like AWS let companies hire out this equipment virtually.

In this way, many of the apps we use everyday either partially or fully rely on cloud computing platforms to stay online. This is cost-effective for customers, as they pay for AWS services as and when they need them, and can scale up as their businesses need.

The major downside to this is that when services like AWS go offline or experience issues, the businesses affected are largely powerless. Snapchat, the wildly popular messaging app, is affected, and Snapchat itself can likely do nothing to remedy this. It’ll have to wait until AWS services are fixed.

The outage today also highlights the wider internet’s reliance on AWS, one of the major cloud computing suppliers worldwide. Amazon-owned Alexa services and Ring doorbells have been affected, alongside Zoom, Signal, Canva, Fortnite, Roblox, several UK banking apps and more besides.

AWS’s main rivals include Microsoft, Google and Oracle, three other US tech companies that provide competing cloud services to customers.

Outages like this show that only one of these tech giants’ services have to go down for a major portion of the modern internet to effectively fall to its knees – with the owners of the apps and services themselves effectively powerless to fix anything, and people around the world unable to use the services.