A huge outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday caused problems all around the world, taking down some of the most popular websites and apps for hours. The massive failure, which was caused by a problem with AWS’s core network, made it very clear how much of the modern internet relies on the labor of just one business.
The disruption, which disrupted thousands of businesses on several continents, hit industries from finance and journalism to gaming and education. It was one of the biggest internet outages in recent memory.
The Immediate Effect
The outage quickly shut down many parts of digital life:
Messaging and Social Media: Millions of people couldn’t use apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, Signal, and Reddit, which meant they couldn’t send messages or see information.
Financial Services: Major trading and financial platforms, such Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and a number of UK banking sites, like Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland, had major problems.
Amazon’s Own Services: The internet giant’s own ecosystem was also compromised. Services like its main shopping website (Amazon.com), Alexa smart devices, Prime Video, and Ring doorbell cameras were all affected.
The Failure’s Root Cause and Scale
The problem started on Monday AM (US time) in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia, which is Amazon’s oldest and most important data center. Amazon first said there were “significant error rates and latencies,” but later found out that the problem was with the Domain Name System (DNS). Because of this problem, apps and websites couldn’t find and talk to their servers appropriately.
AWS later said that the outage was caused by a problem with its DNS system and a problem with a network health monitoring subsystem that only affected the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Network Load Balancer. These systems are very important for efficiently routing internet traffic between servers.
Outage tracker Downdetector got more than 11 million complaints of AWS problems from consumers, while Ookla said that more than 4 million individual users had direct problems, showing how big the failure was.
Amazon’s Answer and Expert Opinion
Around 0711 GMT, Amazon’s engineers found the problem and started working on a fix. They did this by carefully slowing down operations to stabilize the network. AWS said at 10:30 GMT that the DNS problem had been “fully mitigated,” but it took several more hours to clear the system because of the data backlog. The business said at the end of the day that “all AWS services have returned to normal operations.”
Experts said that the lengthy recovery process was like slowly restoring power after a massive blackout. They stressed the importance of cautiously bringing systems back online to prevent putting too much load on them later.
This incident is at least the third major AWS outage due to the US-EAST-1 region since 2020. It shows how vulnerable this default data center is for a lot of the world’s digital infrastructure.
Experts in cybersecurity and technology said that the outage is a clear sign of how fragile and centralized the internet has become. Analysts compared the scenario to “putting all economic eggs in one basket.” They said that only three companies—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—take care of most of the world’s online infrastructure.
Amazon said there was no data loss or cyberattack, but analysts think the disruption might cost hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the world in lost transactions and productivity. AWS has said that it will shortly issue a full report on what happened.