AWS Outage Brings Down Half the Internet for Hours: What Happened and Why It Matters

On the Monday of a gigantic Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, access to some of the largest global websites and applications was cut off for millions of users for several hours, with WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, and Signal among the main ones affected. The widespread outage, which was the result of a network failure within AWS's main infrastructure, revealed yet again the extent to which the contemporary internet is reliant on a limited number of cloud service providers.

🌐 What Happened

The outage originated in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, one of Amazon’s oldest and most critical data centers.

According to Amazon, the issue began with “significant error rates and latencies” in its Domain Name System (DNS), which stopped apps and websites from connecting to their servers.

By the time engineers identified and mitigated the fault, millions across the world were already affected — from social media platforms to online banking and even Amazon’s own ecosystem.

🚫 What Went Down

The outage hit a wide range of services and platforms, including:

• Social & messaging apps: WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Signal, Roblox, and Fortnite
• Streaming & tech platforms: Disney+, Prime Video, Alexa, Ring, Airbnb
• Finance & trading apps: Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo
• UK-based services: Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, BT, Vodafone, HMRC
• Amazon’s own services: Amazon.com, Alexa devices, and Kindle

Reports of downtime flooded Downdetector, which logged over 11 million complaints, while Ookla estimated disruptions impacted more than 4 million users globally.

⚙️ The Technical Cause

AWS later confirmed the outage was triggered by a DNS malfunction and a failure in its network health monitoring system — both crucial components that route and balance internet traffic across servers.

These systems’ failure led to cascading connectivity issues across AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Network Load Balancer.

Amazon engineers began mitigation efforts around 07:11 GMT, and by 10:30 GMT, the company reported the issue was “fully mitigated”. However, restoring data flows and cached connections took several more hours.

🕒 Why Recovery Took So Long

Experts likened the recovery process to “restoring power after a blackout” — bringing systems back online too quickly could have triggered further instability.

AWS urged users to clear DNS caches to fully restore connectivity. Some apps and websites continued experiencing lags well into Tuesday.

🔁 A Recurring Problem

This marks the third major AWS outage in five years linked to the same US-EAST-1 region. The data hub’s default status for many AWS services makes it both central and vulnerable, amplifying the ripple effects of any failure.

💬 Expert Take

Technology and cybersecurity experts warn that the outage underscores the centralized fragility of the internet.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” said Patrick Burgess of the UK’s Chartered Institute for IT. “When a major provider like AWS goes down, the ripple effects are immediate and global.”

Analysts compared the situation to “putting all economic eggs in one basket,” noting that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively power most of the internet’s infrastructure.

💰 Economic Impact

While Amazon confirmed no cyberattack or data loss, experts estimate the downtime caused massive economic losses, potentially running into hundreds of billions of dollars in lost transactions and productivity worldwide.

Amazon said it will release a detailed post-incident report soon.

⚠️ The Bigger Picture

The outage is a stark reminder of the internet’s overreliance on a few tech giants. With so much of the global digital ecosystem dependent on AWS and its peers, even a brief outage can have far-reaching consequences — from halting payments and streaming to freezing communication channels.