Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced late Monday that it had resolved a major outage that left thousands of websites and apps offline around the world for much of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and banks like Lloyds and Halifax — went down after technical failures struck Amazon’s cloud network in the United States. Downdetector, a global outage tracker, reported more than 11 million user complaints during the disruption.
Experts said the incident exposed the risks of relying too heavily on a few dominant cloud providers.
A single fault disrupts millions
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage revealed the fragile nature of the internet’s infrastructure. He explained that many services depend on external systems beyond their control. “Even a small human error can trigger global disruptions,” he said.
The problems began around 07:00 BST on Monday, as users struggled to access platforms such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had recorded over four million reports across 500 websites — double the usual weekday average. That figure later surpassed 11 million as more services, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, faced outages.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed all AWS systems were fully operational again after engineers temporarily restricted parts of the network to address the root cause.
Cascading failures worsen the crisis
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the event to a regional power failure. He said Amazon likely restored some systems initially, only for deeper technical issues to trigger new failures. “It’s like fixing flickering lights without repairing the faulty wiring,” he said.
Amazon has not provided a full explanation of the outage. In a brief update, it said the problem appeared linked to DNS resolution for its DynamoDB API in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s address book, converting website names into numerical codes computers can read. When it fails, browsers cannot locate sites, leaving users unable to connect.
Tech concentration sparks warnings
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the outage highlighted the dangers of relying on a few major cloud providers. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s,” he said. “The cloud allows rapid growth, but a single failure can impact millions of users.”
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 rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she called “structurally risky.”
“When a major provider fails, entire sectors can grind to a halt,” Crider said. She urged governments and businesses to invest in more diverse and regional cloud services.
Companies urged to strengthen resilience
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said companies relying on AWS share part of the blame. “Many firms fail to design adequate backup systems into their applications,” he said. Outages like this happen regularly, but few are this severe.
Birman added that the technology exists to create resilient and secure systems. “We know how to prevent failures like this,” he said. “But many companies prioritise convenience over reliability.”
Legal and economic consequences loom
The question of accountability may reach the courts. Following last year’s CrowdStrike failure, Delta Airlines is still seeking over $500 million in damages after being forced to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing days of delays.
The AWS outage has renewed concerns about whether the global internet depends too heavily on a handful of technology giants — and whether the world can withstand another single-provider failure.
