Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had fixed a major outage that left thousands of websites and apps offline worldwide for most of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and major banks like Lloyds and Halifax — were affected by problems in Amazon’s US-based cloud network. Downdetector, a global outage tracker, recorded more than 11 million reports during the disruption.
Experts said the event highlighted the risks of concentrating critical internet infrastructure in the hands of a few powerful companies.
Millions affected by a single system failure
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage exposed the fragile nature of digital infrastructure. He warned that many services rely on third-party systems beyond their control. “Even small human mistakes can trigger global disruption,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday, with users reporting difficulties accessing platforms such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had logged over four million reports across 500 websites — double the normal weekday average. The number later climbed to over 11 million as additional services, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, faced outages.
At 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed all AWS services were fully restored after engineers temporarily throttled parts of the network to fix the underlying issue.
Cascading failures amplified the disruption
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the event to a regional power grid failure. He said partial restorations may have triggered further problems before the root cause was resolved. “It’s like turning on flickering lights without repairing the wiring,” he explained.
Amazon has not provided a full account of the failure. In a short update, the company said the issue appeared related to DNS resolution in the DynamoDB API for its US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, functions as the internet’s directory, converting website names into numerical addresses that computers can read. When DNS fails, browsers cannot locate websites, cutting users off entirely.
Dependence on cloud giants raises alarm
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the outage underscored the risks of overreliance on a few cloud providers. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s,” he said. “Cloud computing enables scale, but a single failure can impact millions globally.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, likened the outage to “a collapsed bridge in the digital economy.” She said roughly 70% of global cloud services rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she called “structurally dangerous.”
“When one major provider fails, entire sectors can grind to a halt,” Crider warned. She urged governments and businesses to invest in local and diversified cloud services to reduce systemic risk.
Companies urged to improve resilience
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said businesses relying on AWS share responsibility. “Many firms do not build adequate backup systems into their applications,” he said. Outages occur frequently, though few reach this scale.
Birman noted that the tools to build resilient systems already exist. “We know how to make these networks strong and secure,” he said. “But many companies sacrifice safety for speed and convenience.”
Legal and financial fallout expected
Questions of liability could move to the courts. After last year’s CrowdStrike failure, 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 concerns about whether the global internet depends too heavily on a few tech giants — and whether another single-provider failure could once again paralyze large parts of the digital economy.
