Global Internet Disrupted as Major AWS Outage Cripples Thousands of Sites and Apps

LONDON/WASHINGTON—A significant disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud computing provider, caused a major global internet outage on Monday, crippling services for thousands of websites, applications, and businesses across multiple sectors.

The outage, which began early Monday morning, centered on AWS’s critical US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, but its impact quickly rippled worldwide due to the massive reliance on AWS infrastructure. Popular platforms, including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Venmo, and various internal Amazon services like the main shopping website and Alexa, reported connectivity issues and downtime for hours.

Root Cause Identified

AWS engineers worked through the day to resolve the issue. In updates posted to its service health dashboard, Amazon initially confirmed "increased error rates and latencies" for multiple services. The company later narrowed the root cause, stating the issue was an underlying malfunction related to the Domain Name System (DNS) resolution for its DynamoDB API endpoint—a core database service.

DNS acts as the internet's phonebook, translating website names into IP addresses. The failure of this system effectively made it impossible for countless applications and services to connect and communicate, leading to widespread chaos. Later updates suggested the issue was also tied to an "underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers."

Widespread Impact Felt Across Industries

The disruption was felt universally. Users reported problems with:

• Social Media and Communication: Snapchat, Signal, and Slack.

• Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, and PlayStation Network.

• Finance: Cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and trading platforms like Robinhood.

• E-commerce and Logistics: Amazon's own retail site, and disruption to airline services, including Delta and United, although major flight delays were not immediately reported.

• Learning and Productivity: Duolingo and Canvas.

In the UK, customers of major banks like Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax reported being locked out of online services, and even the official HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) website was impacted.

A Stark Reminder of Cloud Dependency

Technology analysts were quick to point out that the massive scale of the outage highlights the increasing and fragile reliance of the modern internet on a small number of colossal cloud providers, specifically Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

"This incident is a stark reminder of how much of our daily digital life runs on the infrastructure provided by just a few companies," said a cybersecurity expert. "When a single region of one provider falters, the domino effect is instant and global."

While AWS services began to show "significant signs of recovery" by late morning, the company cautioned that full resolution would take time as its systems worked through a massive backlog of queued requests. Authorities, including the UK government, confirmed they were in contact with Amazon regarding the incident. At the time of reporting, engineers were still working toward a full restoration, with some users continuing to experience intermittent errors.

There is no indication that the outage was the result of a malicious cyberattack, with experts classifying it as a severe internal systems malfunction.