A major disruption involving Amazon Web Services (AWS), the powerful cloud service provider underpinning a vast portion of the internet, rendered countless websites and popular applications inaccessible for more than two hours on Monday. This incident served as a stark reminder of the delicate and interconnected nature of global technology infrastructure.
The widespread outage began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time, impacting a range of services from major banks and gaming platforms to entertainment apps. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon announced that most affected services were gradually returning to normal, though they continued to process a significant backlog of queued requests.
Among the popular services hit by the disruption were WhatsApp, essential British government websites and tax services, the payment app Venmo, cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, and even games hosted by The New York Times. Dozens of other prominent companies and retailers, including Amazon itself, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald’s, Ring doorbells, and the popular game Fortnite, also reported service interruptions.
Internet outage tracker Down Detector noted over eight million reports related to Amazon Web Services by 9:45 a.m. Eastern, with a significant number originating from the United States and Britain.
Amazon’s preliminary investigation, updated at 11:43 a.m., suggested the issue affecting multiple services in its Northern Virginia region stemmed from an internal system responsible for monitoring and balancing traffic across its network.
Experts quickly pointed out that this event once again underscored the internet’s heavy reliance on a handful of dominant technology providers – including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When any one of these giants encounters an issue, millions of users worldwide can face immediate and significant disruptions. This echoed a broader, day-long internet outage last year, triggered by a faulty update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Thousands of clients depend on Amazon Web Services for their most complex, demanding, and data-intensive operations, encompassing everything from streaming video and running sophisticated web applications to storing colossal amounts of digital information.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, speculated that Monday’s problem could have originated from a technical glitch in one of Amazon’s primary data centers. However, he emphasized the inherent opacity of cloud platform operations, making it impossible to ascertain the exact cause without Amazon’s full disclosure. Dr. Halpin recounted waking up to urgent emails from soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine, whose VPN services were affected, highlighting how critical infrastructure, including that of governments globally, is vulnerable due to this reliance.
“If your entire nation’s infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that’s an exceedingly dangerous situation,” he warned. “Everyone takes it for normal,” Dr. Halpin added, referring to the internet’s dependence on a few key providers, “But it’s not normal.”
Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University in England, noted that Amazon’s “us-east-1” region in Northern Virginia, where the issues were reported, houses one of its largest data centers. He explained that while cloud computing generally works well for everyday operations, even a minor error, like a flawed update, can cascade and bring down an entire system.
Some media advocates argue that the outage, which also impacted secure communication apps like Signal and other digital tools, highlights an urgent need for greater diversification in cloud computing services.
Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, stated, “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
Despite the significant disruption, Amazon’s share price showed minimal movement in premarket trading, suggesting that investors were largely unconcerned by the outage. In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services contributed nearly 20 percent of Amazon’s total sales but accounted for approximately 60 percent of its operating profit.
Amazon’s cloud-computing division boasts a global infrastructure, enabling clients to scale their operations up or down without the heavy investment in their own costly hardware. Rebecca Wright, a computer science professor at Barnard College in New York City, acknowledged the benefits for smaller companies, who gain access to specialized expertise by relying on providers like AWS. “There’s definitely trade-offs, but I would not say that the solution is to tell companies, ‘Don’t outsource your cybersecurity to a company with cybersecurity expertise,’” she commented.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company, recalled that two decades ago, most companies managed their own data centers. Today, he observed, a majority depend on Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Chinese cloud providers. However, he also noted a recent trend over the past two to three years where rising costs have prompted some companies to revert to managing their own infrastructure.
This latest outage could further intensify calls for companies and governments to prioritize hosting their cloud services within their respective regions, fostering greater digital sovereignty.
Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, emphasized after Monday’s disruption that critical European data and digital infrastructure should be hosted by European companies under E.U. jurisdiction. She described the outage as a “stark reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience.”