As global AWS outage disrupted major platforms, Elon Musk promoted X Chat’s ‘AWS-Free’ messaging

A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday disrupted a swath of popular websites and applications around the world, exposing the internet’s heavy reliance on the cloud infrastructure run by the e-commerce giant.

The disruption, traced to a critical infrastructure zone in AWS’s U.S.–East–1 region in Virginia — one of its largest data hubs — caused widespread downtime for major platforms including Snapchat, Perplexity, Canva, Fortnite, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Duolingo. Even Amazon’s own services, including Prime Video, Alexa, and Amazon.com, reported connectivity problems, according to monitoring site Downdetector.

In a post on its service status page, AWS acknowledged “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple systems and said engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”

Because AWS powers nearly one-third of the global cloud computing market, its outages often have far-reaching ripple effects. Monday’s incident marked the most significant global tech disruption since the 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction, which crippled hospitals, banks, and airports worldwide.

Among the companies affected were AI startup Perplexity, which said the “root cause is an AWS issue,” along with trading platforms Robinhood and Coinbase. Gaming services such as Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash Royale also reported downtime, while financial and mobility apps including Venmo, Chime, and Lyft were hit.

The disruption spread beyond the United States. In Britain, banks such as Lloyds and Bank of Scotland, telecom giants Vodafone and BT, and even the U.K. tax authority HMRC faced technical problems, according to Downdetector’s U.K. tracker.

As much of the web grappled with the outage, billionaire Elon Musk used the moment to promote his own technology. Posting on X, Musk highlighted the platform’s encrypted messaging feature, X Chat, as a “safer” and “independent” alternative, free from what he called “AWS dependencies.”

“The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk wrote. “You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls.”

Later, as services slowly began to recover, Musk posted a brief follow-up: “X works.”

Pretty weird that an AWS outage caused Signal to fail … https://t.co/MzAtJPjAla

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025

????, babe, you up? https://t.co/QvsPCVMA3d

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025

???? works

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025