Cloud Giant Faces Early Morning Disruption
In the early hours of Monday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud infrastructure provider, experienced a significant outage that rippled across the digital landscape, affecting numerous prominent websites and services. The disruption began at 12:11 a.m. PDT in AWS’s primary US-East-1 region, based in Northern Virginia.
Technical Glitch Rooted in DNS Issues
According to AWS, the outage stemmed from DNS (Domain Name System) problems associated with DynamoDB, a pivotal database service within its ecosystem. DNS, which acts as the internet’s address book, translates domain names into IP addresses to facilitate access to websites and apps. A failure in this process effectively halted connections to multiple services.
AWS labeled the incident an “operational issue” impacting multiple services, and by 2:01 a.m. PDT, engineers were executing recovery efforts on several fronts. The outage affected more than 70 AWS services, disrupting not only internal operations but also third-party applications worldwide.
Gradual Recovery and System Stabilization
Shortly after the initial report, AWS indicated that “significant signs of recovery” were underway. By 3:35 a.m. PDT, the company declared the issue had been “fully mitigated”, noting that most services were operating normally. However, residual slowdowns and request throttling continued as systems worked through a backlog of pending tasks.
Widespread Impact on Major Platforms
The reach of AWS’s infrastructure is vast, and the effects of the outage were felt across a spectrum of industries. According to monitoring platform Downdetector, users reported issues with platforms such as:
- Amazon.com
- Disney+
- Lyft
- McDonald’s app
- Snapchat
- T-Mobile
- United Airlines
- Venmo
- Verizon
- The New York Times
- Ring
- Robinhood
Even government services weren’t spared, with the UK’s Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs experiencing downtime.
A spokesperson for the UK government confirmed coordination with AWS, stating, “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. We are in contact with the company as they work to restore full functionality.”
Financial Institutions and Airlines Disrupted
Financial institutions such as Lloyds Banking Group also confirmed service interruptions, reassuring customers that recovery was in progress. Similarly, Reddit reported efforts to scale operations back to full capacity.
Meanwhile, passengers on United and Delta Air Lines encountered difficulties checking in or accessing booking information. These disruptions extended to cloud-based games like Roblox and Fortnite, while Coinbase users were unable to access their crypto accounts during the incident.
Canva, Perplexity, and AI Services Affected
Graphic design platform Canva revealed that the outage led to increased error rates, directly affecting its usability. Perplexity AI, a generative AI search tool, was also impacted. CEO Aravind Srinivas cited AWS as the root cause, stating the team was actively working to resolve the issue.
A Broader Pattern of Centralized Vulnerability
This outage isn’t an isolated event. In July 2024, a botched software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered a global tech infrastructure failure, affecting Microsoft Windows systems, grounding flights, and halting operations in hospitals and banks.
AWS itself has a history of outages:
- A 2023 disruption took many websites offline for hours.
- A more severe 2021 incident impacted Amazon’s delivery services and multiple international platforms.
Experts Weigh In
Despite the scale of the outage, there’s no indication of a cyberattack. According to Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN, the incident appears to be a technical fault at one of Amazon’s main data centers. “These issues occur when a network component fails or becomes overloaded, causing widespread ripple effects across dependent systems,” he noted.
Mike Chapple, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame, highlighted the crucial but often invisible role of services like DynamoDB: “It’s not widely known by end users, but it’s a backbone of the modern internet.”
He added, “This doesn’t appear to be a data loss issue. Rather, it’s a misconfiguration or problem in the records that direct other systems to the correct data locations.”
The Fragility of the Cloud-Dependent World
This incident serves as a stark reminder of how deeply reliant global digital infrastructure is on a handful of cloud giants—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. As Chapple aptly summarized, “When a major cloud provider sneezes, the internet catches a cold.”
