Hundreds of websites and popular applications suddenly went offline for over two hours on Monday after Amazon Web Services (AWS), a powerhouse of global internet infrastructure, experienced a significant disruption. This incident once again highlighted just how vulnerable our interconnected digital world can be.
The outage, which began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern time, impacted essential services like major banks, online gaming platforms, and various entertainment apps. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon reported that most affected services were coming back online, though engineers were still clearing a backlog of requests.
The list of impacted services was extensive, including WhatsApp, the official British government website, government tax services, the Venmo payment app, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, and even games hosted by The New York Times. Numerous other companies and retailers, such as Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells, and McDonald’s, also faced service interruptions.
The precise cause of the outage wasn’t immediately clear, but there were no signs pointing to a cyberattack.
Technology experts quickly pointed out that such widespread disruptions underscore the internet’s heavy reliance on a select few major providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one of these giants falters, millions of users worldwide feel the ripple effect. This isn’t a new phenomenon; a similar day-long internet blackout last year stemmed from a flawed software update from a cybersecurity company named CrowdStrike.
AWS serves thousands of clients, supporting critical, data-intensive operations from streaming video and running web applications to vast digital storage. Its global infrastructure allows businesses to reach customers everywhere, offering scalable, cost-effective cloud solutions that eliminate the need for hefty hardware investments.
Amazon’s initial Monday statement confirmed issues across 28 services, specifically mentioning its “US-EAST-1” region, and assured the public that engineers were actively working to contain the impact and pinpoint the root cause.
Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN, a virtual private network service, suggested that early evidence indicated a technical fault at one of Amazon’s primary data centers might be responsible. He emphasized, “Outages of this scale expose our overreliance on centralized infrastructures. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized and resilient, yet today so much of our online ecosystem is concentrated in a small number of cloud regions.”
Free speech advocates also voiced concerns, noting that the outage disrupted secure communication apps like Signal. Corinne Cath-Speth, digital head for Article 19, stressed the need for greater diversification in cloud computing. “When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it,” she stated. “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
Despite the widespread inconvenience, Amazon’s stock price showed minimal movement in premarket trading. This indicates that investors remained largely unfazed, perhaps due to AWS’s significant contribution to Amazon’s profitability – nearly 20% of sales and around 60% of operating profit in the first half of the year.