Streaming services tied to Amazon have suffered a widespread disruption this morning following a serious outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing arm behind many major platforms worldwide.
According to reports from users in the United Kingdom, United States and Asia, access to Amazon Prime Video, Alexa-based services, and various third-party apps ceased working or became extremely sluggish from around 08:00 UK time. The outage has left millions of viewers unable to stream, while some services displayed loading or error messages.
AWS issued a terse statement acknowledging “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple systems, though the company did not immediately confirm the impact on Amazon’s entertainment or e-commerce services.
Industry monitors tracked a sharp spike in outage reports on platforms such as Downdetector, specifically for Prime Video and other Amazon streaming endpoints. In the UK, major cities including London, Manchester and Glasgow saw particularly high concentration of reports.
The issue appears to stem from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia), one of its primary hubs, where DNS and API resolution faults are affecting downstream services.
Many services reliant on AWS infrastructure — including Amazon’s own streaming operations — are therefore caught in the disruption.
Media analysts say the outage underscores how dependent global streaming and content platforms have become on cloud-computing infrastructure. “When a major region goes offline, the ripple effect touches everything from entertainment to banking,” noted one analyst – echoing the variety of services disrupted this morning, from games to finance.
Reuters
Users took to social platforms to express frustration. One UK viewer tweeted: “Prime Video just shows loading forever – what happened to 100 % uptime?” The disruption comes at a time when consumers expect uninterrupted access to streaming libraries and live content.
In addition to streaming issues, other AWS-dependent services such as enterprise cloud platforms and mobile apps reported failures. Banking firms in the UK including Lloyds and the Bank of Scotland experienced login and transaction problems, according to early reports.
Amazon has yet to publish a detailed timeline for resolution but says its engineers are working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” Users have been advised to monitor the AWS status dashboard for updates.
In a business where live premieres, sport and exclusive content depend on delivery infrastructure, the incident could result in reputational damage if not resolved swiftly. For many viewers, today’s interruption is a sharp reminder of how invisible cloud services power visible entertainment.
Source: BBC, The Guardian, Reuters
