Key Takeaways
- Major Amazon Web Services outage disrupted popular internet services for hours
- Streaming platforms, banking, messaging apps, and government websites affected
- AWS handles nearly one-third of global cloud infrastructure
- Outage highlights critical dependency on major cloud providers
A widespread Amazon Web Services outage on Monday left popular internet services offline for hours, affecting streaming platforms, banking services, messaging apps, and government websites globally.
The disruption impacted Amazon’s own Prime Video service, Disney+, Perplexity AI, Fortnite, Airbnb, Snapchat, and Duolingo. Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp experienced issues in Europe, while users reported problems accessing Amazon’s e-commerce shop and banks like Lloyd’s.
Scale of the Disruption
Downdetector recorded more than 11 million problem reports during the outage, with a massive spike in disruptions occurring nine hours after the initial issues began. The internet trouble tracker documented one of the largest service disruption events in recent memory.
Amazon confirmed the system had returned to “pre-event levels” but estimated it would take two hours to clear the data backlog caused by the problem. The company applied “mitigations to resolve launch failures” linked to a “load balancer health” issue at AWS.
Technical Root Cause
Engineers identified a DNS issue at 0711 GMT that caused “increased error rates” across multiple services. While the immediate DNS problem was resolved, it created a substantial backlog of stalled requests that took more than 10 hours to fully process.
“The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” Amazon stated in a status update.
Global Cloud Dependency
AWS controls nearly one-third of the global cloud infrastructure market, powering millions of applications and websites worldwide. The outage demonstrated the extensive reliance on major cloud providers for essential online services.
Financial analyst Michael Hewson noted: “How reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet, for many of the online services we more or less take for granted. On an economic level it’s almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.”
Critical Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
The British government’s websites were among those affected, highlighting how cloud outages can impact essential services. Emarketer senior analyst Jacob Bourne warned: “Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally.”
He added: “As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder.”
Recent Major Outage Context
This incident follows another global outage in July 2024 when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued a faulty software update affecting airports, hospitals, and numerous organizations. Microsoft reported approximately 8.5 million devices were affected, resulting in system crashes and the notorious “blue screen of death” for users.
