Key Takeaways
- Major AWS outage disrupted thousands of websites and apps globally for hours
- Snapchat, Zoom, Fortnite, Venmo, and government services among those affected
- Outage caused by DNS failure at Amazon’s Virginia data center, not cyberattack
- Financial impact estimated in hundreds of billions due to lost productivity
A massive Amazon Web Services outage on Monday brought down significant portions of the internet, affecting millions of users worldwide. Services including Snapchat, Zoom, Fortnite, and government platforms experienced hours of disruption due to a technical failure in AWS’s DNS system.
The outage began around 3 am ET (12:30 pm IST) and persisted for over six hours for some users. Amazon confirmed the issue stemmed from their US-EAST-1 Region, affecting the Domain Name System that converts web addresses to IP addresses.
What is Amazon Web Services?
Amazon Web Services dominates cloud computing with 30% market share, providing infrastructure to companies ranging from Snapchat to McDonald’s. Instead of maintaining physical servers, businesses rent AWS’s global computing power to run their websites and applications.
The cloud service holds a significant lead over competitors Microsoft Azure (20%) and Google Cloud (13%), making it a critical backbone for much of the internet.
Services Impacted by the Outage
The disruption affected a wide spectrum of digital services:
- Social Media: Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit
- Communication: Zoom, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal
- Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Clash of Clans, PokemonGo
- Financial: Venmo, Coinbase, UK banking services
- Government: UK’s HMRC tax service and Gov.uk website
- Other: Canva, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, McDonald’s, Hulu
Coinbase assured users that “all funds are safe” despite platform access issues. The UK government confirmed they were in contact with Amazon to restore services.
Root Cause: DNS Failure
Cybersecurity experts confirmed the outage resulted from a technical fault, not a cyberattack. The problem originated in an “internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers” at Amazon’s Virginia data center.
DNS (Domain Name System) acts as the internet’s address book, translating domain names like amazon.com into numerical IP addresses. When DNS fails, websites appear unavailable or cannot be found.
While DNS issues are common, the scale of this outage was exceptional due to AWS’s massive reach.
Financial Impact
Estimates suggest major websites lose $75 million hourly during outages. Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint warned the total financial impact could “easily reach into the hundreds of billions” due to lost productivity and halted business operations.
AWS Outage History
This isn’t the first major AWS disruption. Previous significant outages occurred in:
- 2023: Multiple websites offline for hours
- 2021: Five-hour outage affecting airlines, payment apps, and streaming services
- 2017: Incident caused by an employee typing wrong command during debugging
The company is expected to conduct a postmortem analysis to explain the DNS system failure in detail.
