Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that it had resolved a major outage that left thousands of websites and apps offline worldwide for most of the day.
Over 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax — were affected by technical failures in Amazon’s US-based cloud network. Downdetector, a global outage monitoring service, reported more than 11 million problem reports during the disruption.
Experts said the event highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on a few dominant cloud providers.
One failure triggers widespread disruption
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage exposed the fragility of global digital infrastructure. Many services rely on external systems that they cannot control. “Even a small human error can have global consequences,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday, when users reported difficulties accessing platforms like Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had logged over four million reports across 500 websites — double the usual weekday total. That number later rose above 11 million as additional platforms, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, went offline.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon said all AWS systems had returned to normal after engineers throttled parts of the network to fix the underlying problem.
Cascading system failures worsen impact
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the outage to a regional power grid failure. He said initial restorations may have caused new issues before the root cause was fixed. “It’s like turning the lights on without repairing the faulty wiring,” he said.
Amazon has not provided a full explanation. In a brief update, the company said the problem appeared linked to DNS resolution in its DynamoDB API in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s directory, translating website names into numerical addresses computers can read. When DNS fails, browsers cannot locate sites, leaving users cut off from the web.
Heavy reliance on cloud giants draws criticism
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the outage highlighted the dangers of depending 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 one failure can affect millions worldwide.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, likened the outage to “a bridge collapsing in the digital economy.” She warned that roughly 70% of global cloud services rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a concentration she described as “structurally risky.”
“When a major provider fails, entire sectors can grind to a halt,” Crider said. She called on governments and businesses to diversify cloud services and invest in local alternatives to reduce future risk.
Businesses urged to build stronger systems
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said companies relying on AWS share part of the responsibility. “Too many organisations fail to design robust backup systems for their applications,” he said. Outages happen often, but few are this severe.
Birman added that the technology to build resilient and secure systems already exists. “We know how to prevent failures like this,” he said. “But many firms sacrifice safety for speed and convenience.”
Legal and financial consequences loom
The question of accountability may end up in the courts. Following last year’s CrowdStrike outage, Delta Airlines is still seeking over $500 million in damages. The airline had to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing several days of flight delays.
The AWS outage has renewed global concern over whether the internet depends too heavily on a handful of tech giants — and whether a single provider’s failure could again paralyze large parts of the digital economy.
