Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced late Monday that it had resolved a major outage that crippled thousands of websites and apps across the globe for much of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and leading banks such as Lloyds and Halifax — went offline due to failures in Amazon’s US-based cloud network. Global tracker Downdetector logged more than 11 million reports of service disruptions during the incident.
Technology experts said the breakdown exposed the dangerous level of dependency the world has on a few powerful cloud providers.
One technical glitch, millions affected
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the event revealed the internet’s deep interconnection. He noted that many digital services depend on external infrastructure run by massive corporations. “A single human error can ripple across the entire online world,” he said.
The problems began around 07:00 BST on Monday, when users started experiencing access issues with popular services such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had registered more than four million problem reports across 500 platforms — more than twice its normal weekday average. That figure later surged to over 11 million as additional services, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, faced outages.
At 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed that all AWS systems had returned to normal after engineers restricted parts of the network to address the root cause.
Chain reaction within Amazon’s cloud
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the disruption to a regional power failure. He said that while engineers likely restored partial service quickly, underlying flaws may have reignited new issues. “It’s like fixing a flickering light while ignoring the faulty wiring behind it,” he said.
Amazon has not yet provided a detailed account of the failure. In a short update, the company stated that the issue seemed linked to DNS resolution affecting its DynamoDB API in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s directory by converting website names into digital addresses computers can locate. When DNS fails, browsers cannot find or load web pages, effectively cutting off entire networks.
Warnings about cloud concentration intensify
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the disruption highlighted the risk of global overreliance on a few cloud operators. “Everyone has a bad day, and today was Amazon’s,” he said. “The cloud enables rapid growth, but one outage can knock out countless services.”
Cori Crider, who leads the Future of Technology Institute, likened the breakdown to “a bridge collapsing in the digital economy.” She warned that about 70% of global cloud services rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she called unsustainable.
“When one of these major firms falters, massive chunks of the economy grind to a halt,” Crider said. She urged governments and corporations to invest in more diverse, localised cloud systems to reduce risk.
Businesses must build stronger safety nets
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said many companies relying on AWS share responsibility for the scale of the disruption. “Too many organisations fail to include proper backup systems in their apps,” he said.
Birman explained that while cloud failures occur often, few reach this magnitude. “We already know how to make these systems resilient and secure,” he said. “But many firms sacrifice reliability for convenience until it’s too late.”
Legal and financial fallout ahead
The question of accountability may now shift to the courts. Following last year’s CrowdStrike outage, Delta Airlines is still seeking to recover more than $500 million in losses. The airline had to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing days of delays and cancellations.
The AWS collapse could trigger similar disputes, reigniting debate about whether the world’s digital infrastructure is too concentrated — and whether depending on a few cloud giants has made the internet itself dangerously fragile.
