Elon Musk mocks AWS outage, promotes X Chat as an alternative

Elon Musk has taken a jab at Amazon Web Services (AWS) following a massive global outage that disrupted several popular websites and apps worldwide.

Using the opportunity to promote his own platform, Musk described X Chat as a safer and more reliable messaging option.

“The messages on X Chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange AWS dependencies — I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Musk also noted that the platform supports file transfers and audio/video calls, highlighting its versatility compared to competitors.

The outage, which struck AWS, Amazon’s powerful cloud computing arm, caused widespread disruptions, taking down major services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Canva, and Reddit.

Even Amazon’s own platforms such as Prime Video, Alexa, and Amazon.com faced connectivity problems, according to data from Downdetector.

In an update on its status page, AWS said it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies” and that engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”

The issue was traced to a key infrastructure zone in its US-East-1 region in Virginia, one of the world’s largest cloud hubs.

For those unversed, the outage is the most significant since the 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction that affected hospitals, banks, and airports globally.