Perplexity AI is facing an outage in India, with users reporting that the website and mobile app are not loading. Downdetector shows a sudden spike in complaints beginning the afternoon of October 20, indicating a major disruption rather than isolated failures. The issue is linked to the ongoing Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that has affected several platforms globally. Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas confirmed the dependency on AWS and acknowledged the disruption in a post on X, stating: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.” The confirmation aligns with user reports indicating failed page loads, stalled queries and service timeouts.
Key problems faced by users
Data from Downdetector shows that 50 percent of the reports are tied to problems on the website, followed by 38 percent on the app and 12 percent related to login issues. Users in India are unable to initiate new queries or load previous conversations, and the failures appear consistent with a backend dependency failure rather than a client-side glitch.
Part of the larger AWS outage
This outage comes as AWS is experiencing a critical incident in its US-East-1 (N. Virginia) region, causing elevated error rates and latency across multiple services. The AWS issue has already taken down or degraded Snapchat, Alexa, Ring, Roblox, Prime Video, Perplexity, Venmo, Fortnite and other platforms that rely on Amazon’s infrastructure for authentication and compute.
AWS has stated that engineers are applying mitigations but has not provided a definitive recovery timeline. Perplexity has not issued a separate status page update beyond the CEO’s statement. Service restoration is expected to depend on AWS recovery. Until then, users may continue to experience disruption with no confirmed time to resolution.
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