Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had restored service after a major outage left thousands of websites and apps offline worldwide for most 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, reported over 11 million problem reports during the disruption.
Experts said the incident highlighted the risks of relying heavily on a few dominant cloud providers for critical digital infrastructure.
Millions affected by a single failure
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage exposed the fragility of the global internet. Many services depend on infrastructure beyond their control. “Even minor human errors can trigger widespread disruption,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday, as users reported issues accessing platforms such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had logged more than four million reports across 500 websites — double the normal weekday total. That number later climbed above 11 million as additional 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 problem.
Cascading failures deepen disruption
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the outage to a regional power grid failure. He said partial restorations may have caused further issues before engineers resolved the root fault. “It’s like restoring flickering lights without repairing the wiring,” he said.
Amazon has not yet given 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 computers can read. When DNS fails, browsers cannot locate websites, leaving users cut off entirely.
Reliance on cloud giants raises concern
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the outage highlighted the dangers of relying on a handful of 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 worldwide.”
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 global cloud services depend 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 diversify cloud services and invest in local alternatives to reduce future risk.
Companies urged to strengthen digital resilience
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said firms relying on AWS share part of the responsibility. “Many organisations fail to build adequate backup systems for their applications,” he said. Outages happen frequently, though few reach this scale.
Birman added that the tools to build resilient and secure systems already exist. “We know how to prevent failures like this,” he said. “Yet many companies prioritise convenience over reliability.”
Legal and financial consequences loom
Questions of accountability could move to the courts. Following 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 renewed concern over whether the internet depends too heavily on a few tech giants — and whether one provider’s failure could again paralyse major parts of the digital economy.
