Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of Amazon, suffered a major outage on Monday that temporarily brought down websites and online services used by millions of people around the world. The disruption affected everything from social media and online banking to airlines, gaming platforms, and government portals, underscoring the reach of the company’s cloud infrastructure.
The outage began early Monday in AWS’s U.S. East region, centered in northern Virginia, which serves as the company’s largest and oldest data center hub. Amazon confirmed that the issue stemmed from a failure in its Domain Name System (DNS), which acts as a map directing users to online destinations. The problem prevented applications from finding the correct addresses for key AWS services, including DynamoDB, a database that supports major platforms.
At its height, the disruption impacted over a thousand companies, with users reporting difficulties accessing services such as Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Zoom, and Roblox. Major British institutions like Lloyds Banking Group and HMRC also experienced downtime, while Amazon’s own systems, including its Seller Central portal and warehouse logistics tools, were briefly offline.
AWS engineers traced the source of the failure to a network subsystem that monitors the health of its load balancers, software that distributes internet traffic across multiple servers. Amazon said the issue affected its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) network, one of its most used services, and triggered cascading failures across interconnected systems.
By Monday evening, the company said all services had returned to normal, though some, including Redshift and AWS Config, required additional time to clear backlogs of delayed data. “We will share a detailed post-event summary,” Amazon said in a statement, adding that no customer data was lost during the disruption.
Technology experts say the incident highlights the fragility of the internet’s architecture, which depends heavily on a few dominant cloud providers. AWS controls roughly a third of the global cloud computing market, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. When one of these networks experiences a malfunction, the effects can quickly ripple through critical sectors worldwide.
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said the outage shows the importance of designing systems with better redundancy. “AWS provides tools for developers to protect against outages, but many companies cut costs and skip those safeguards,” Birman told Reuters. “When that happens, a single technical failure can halt operations across entire industries.”
The disruption also sparked renewed debate about regional digital independence. Some European leaders and analysts have argued that the continent needs its own large-scale cloud infrastructure to reduce dependence on U.S. firms. However, few providers can match AWS’s scale or speed, making such independence a costly and long-term goal.
Amazon said there was no evidence of a cyberattack and that the outage resulted from an internal operational failure. This was the third major incident linked to its Virginia cluster in the past five years, adding pressure on the company to improve reliability in one of its most critical regions.
While most systems recovered within hours, the episode served as another reminder of how intertwined daily life has become with a handful of technology giants and how even a routine technical fault can momentarily shake the digital world.
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