Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed late Monday that it had fixed a large-scale outage that shut down thousands of websites and apps worldwide for much of the day.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and major banks such as Lloyds and Halifax — went offline after technical failures in Amazon’s cloud network in the United States. Global outage tracker Downdetector recorded over 11 million reports during the disruption.
Experts said the collapse showed how dangerously dependent the global internet has become on a handful of cloud providers.
How one fault took the world offline
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage demonstrated how deeply connected digital infrastructure has become. He warned that most online services rely on external systems that can fail without warning. “Even a minor error can create global consequences,” he said.
The first complaints appeared around 07:00 BST on Monday when users reported issues with services like Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had received over four million reports across 500 websites — twice its normal weekday average. That number later climbed past 11 million as other platforms, including Reddit and Lloyds Bank, struggled to recover.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed all AWS services had returned to normal after engineers restricted parts of their network to fix the core problem.
Engineers race to stop cascading failures
Mike Chapple, an information technology professor at Notre Dame University, compared the event to a regional power grid collapse. He said systems may have come back online briefly before failing again. “It’s like turning the lights on without fixing the broken wiring behind the wall,” he said.
Amazon has not yet provided a detailed explanation of the cause. In a short update, the company said the issue appeared linked to DNS resolution problems involving its DynamoDB API in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s directory by converting website names into numerical codes. When DNS systems break down, browsers cannot locate sites, leaving millions locked out of the web.
Tech giants under scrutiny for overconcentration
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the outage highlighted the enormous influence a few companies hold over the digital world. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s,” he said. “Cloud computing enables scale, but when one fails, millions lose access instantly.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, compared the disruption to “a digital bridge collapsing.” She warned that nearly 70% of global cloud services rely on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — a dominance she called “a structural threat.”
“When one major provider goes down, entire sectors follow,” Crider said. She urged governments and businesses to diversify their systems and invest in regional alternatives to reduce the risk of global breakdowns.
Firms urged to build better safety systems
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said some of the responsibility lies with companies that depend on AWS. “Too many organisations fail to design strong backup systems,” he said.
Birman explained that outages like this occur more often than many realise, though few reach this scale. “We already know how to make cloud systems more secure and resilient,” he said. “But too many firms ignore those lessons until disaster strikes.”
Legal fallout looms after widespread damage
The question of accountability could soon reach the courts. After a major outage at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike last year, Delta Airlines is still seeking to recover more than $500 million in losses. The airline had to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing days of delays and cancellations.
The Amazon outage has reignited global debate about the concentration of cloud services — and whether the internet’s backbone has become too fragile to withstand the failure of a single provider.
