Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had fixed a widespread outage that left thousands of websites and apps offline around the world for much of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax — were affected by failures in Amazon’s US-based cloud network. Downdetector, a global outage tracker, recorded over 11 million reports during the disruption.
Experts said the event revealed the risks of relying heavily on a handful of cloud providers.
One failure cuts off millions of users
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said the outage showed how fragile digital infrastructure has become. He explained that many services rely on external systems outside their control. “Even small human mistakes can trigger global disruption,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday, as users reported trouble accessing platforms like Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had logged more than four million reports across 500 websites — double the usual weekday total. That number later rose above 11 million as more platforms, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, went offline.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed all AWS services had returned to normal after engineers throttled parts of the network to fix the underlying issue.
Technical failures ripple across systems
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the outage to a regional power grid collapse. Partial restorations may have triggered further problems before engineers resolved the core fault. “It’s like fixing flickering lights without repairing the wiring,” he said.
Amazon has not provided a full explanation. In a brief update, the company said the problem appeared linked to DNS resolution in its DynamoDB API in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s directory, converting website names into numerical addresses that computers can read. When DNS fails, browsers cannot find sites, cutting users off entirely.
Cloud reliance raises new concerns
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the outage highlighted the dangers of depending on a few major providers. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s,” he said. “The cloud allows growth, but one failure can impact millions globally.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, compared the outage to “a bridge collapsing in the digital economy.” She said roughly 70% of cloud services worldwide rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she called “structurally risky.”
“When one major provider fails, entire sectors can grind to a halt,” Crider said. She urged governments and businesses to invest in local and diversified cloud services to reduce future risks.
Companies urged to strengthen defences
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said firms relying on AWS share some responsibility. “Many organisations fail to design adequate backup systems for their applications,” he said. Outages occur often, though few reach this scale.
Birman added that the tools to create secure and resilient systems already exist. “We know how to prevent failures like this,” he said. “Yet many companies prioritise convenience over reliability.”
Legal and economic consequences loom
Questions of accountability could reach the courts. After last year’s CrowdStrike outage, Delta Airlines is still seeking over $500 million in damages. The airline had to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing several days of flight delays.
The AWS outage has reignited global concern over whether too much of the internet relies on a few tech giants — and whether a single provider’s failure could again paralyse major parts of the digital economy.
