Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday it had fixed a massive technical failure that took down thousands of websites and apps around the world for much of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and banks like Lloyds and Halifax — went offline after problems emerged in Amazon’s US-based cloud network. Outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 11 million reports of service disruptions worldwide.
Experts warned the incident revealed how heavily the global economy depends on a handful of dominant cloud providers.
A single error causes worldwide disruption
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the event exposed how interconnected the internet’s infrastructure has become. He explained that many online services rely on third-party systems they cannot control. “Even small human errors can cause large-scale digital chaos,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday, when users started reporting problems accessing popular services such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had received over four million reports from 500 sites — twice the typical weekday figure. That number later rose to more than 11 million as platforms including Reddit and Lloyds Bank went down.
At 23:00 BST, Amazon announced all AWS services were operating normally again after it restricted parts of its own network to fix the underlying problem.
Experts believe cascading failures worsened the impact
Mike Chapple, an information technology professor at Notre Dame University, compared the event to a large-scale power outage. He said Amazon’s systems may have briefly recovered before collapsing again. “They might have fixed symptoms before addressing the core cause,” he noted.
Amazon has not yet provided a detailed explanation of what went wrong. In an online update, it said the issue appeared linked to DNS resolution affecting the DynamoDB API in its US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s phone book, turning website names into numeric addresses that computers can locate. When DNS fails, browsers cannot find sites, cutting users off completely.
Dependence on cloud giants raises serious concerns
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the outage underlined the control large cloud firms hold over digital infrastructure. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s,” he said. “Cloud systems allow growth, but when one fails, many vital services fail too.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, compared the outage to “a digital bridge collapse.” She said about 70% of global cloud computing relies on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she called risky and unsustainable.
“When a few major providers stumble, entire sectors of the economy go down,” Crider warned. She urged governments and businesses to diversify their cloud services to prevent future crises.
Businesses urged to strengthen resilience
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said part of the blame lies with companies using AWS. “Too many firms don’t design proper backup systems into their applications,” he said. Outages like this happen regularly, though few reach such a scale.
Birman said developers already know how to build stronger, more secure systems. “We have the knowledge to prevent failures like this,” he said. “But many companies choose convenience over resilience.”
Legal fallout could follow global outage
Responsibility for the outage could soon reach the courts. After a major failure linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last year, Delta Airlines is still trying to recover over $500 million in damages. The airline had to restart 40,000 servers manually, causing several days of delays.
The AWS failure may now spark fresh debate about whether the internet has become too dependent on a few technology giants — and whether that dependence puts the world’s digital economy at constant risk of collapse.
