Amazon Web Services (AWS) has restored operations after a major outage on Monday that disrupted access to some of the world’s most popular websites and applications.
The disruption, which began around 07:00 BST, affected more than 1,000 online platforms, including Snapchat, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Reddit, following a failure traced to the core of Amazon’s cloud computing network in the United States.
According to Downdetector, a global outage monitoring platform, user reports of technical problems surged to over 11 million during the incident.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed that all AWS services had “returned to normal operations” after the company temporarily throttled parts of its system to mitigate the issue.
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey described the event as a stark reminder of the fragility of the internet’s shared infrastructure.
“What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is,” he said. “So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers. Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact.”
The outage disrupted a range of digital services, from online games like Fortnite to learning platforms such as Duolingo. Within hours, Downdetector logged more than four million reports, twice the typical weekday average.
Professor Mike Chapple of Notre Dame University likened Amazon’s recovery process to restoring power after a blackout.
“It’s like when you have a large-scale power outage. Crews start working to try to bring it back on line,” he said. “The power might flicker a few times,” adding that Amazon may have initially “only addressed the symptoms” rather than the root cause.
While Amazon has not yet provided a detailed explanation, the company said the problem “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.” The Domain Name System (DNS) acts as the internet’s phonebook, converting web addresses into numerical identifiers computers can read.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the incident demonstrates the inherent risks of global dependence on a few large cloud providers.
“Everyone has a bad day, today Amazon had a bad day,” he told the BBC. “There are amazing things about the cloud, it allows you to scale… but if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, compared the event to a “bridge collapsing.”
“An essential part of the economy has fallen to pieces,” she said, calling the reliance on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which collectively control about 70 percent of cloud computing, “unsustainable.”
“Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it,” she warned. “We should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms. That’s a risk to our security, our sovereignty and our economy and we need to look at structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kind of shocks.”
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, argued that companies using AWS must also take more responsibility for system resilience.
“Companies using Amazon haven’t been taking enough adequate care to build protection systems into their applications,” he said. “We know how to make these systems stronger, and we know how to do it securely.”
The incident may yet have legal and financial consequences. After a similar outage involving CrowdStrike last year, Delta Air Lines filed a lawsuit seeking over $500 million in damages, claiming the disruption forced it to manually reset 40,000 servers, leading to widespread flight cancellations and delays.
