On Monday, an extensive outage impacting Amazon Web Services (AWS), the dominant cloud provider for much of the internet, rendered numerous websites and applications unusable for more than two hours. This incident underscored the inherent fragility of global technology infrastructure.
The disruption, which commenced shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time, affected vital services including major banks, popular gaming platforms, and entertainment streaming providers. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon reported that most affected services were returning to normal operations, although a backlog of requests was still being processed.
Among the widely used services experiencing interruptions were WhatsApp, various British government websites and tax portals, the payment application Venmo, and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Even major news outlets like The New York Times (for its games) and The Wall Street Journal’s website faced issues. Many other companies and retailers, such as Amazon itself, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald’s, Ring doorbells, and the game Fortnite, also reported service disruptions.
Internet outage tracker Down Detector recorded over eight million reports related to Amazon Web Services as of 9:45 a.m. Eastern, with a significant number originating from the United States and Britain.
Amazon’s preliminary investigation, announced at 11:43 a.m., pointed to an internal system problem in its Northern Virginia data center. This system is responsible for monitoring and balancing network traffic.
Industry experts emphasized that this event once again highlighted the internet’s heavy reliance on a select few major technology providers – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one of these central services experiences issues, it can lead to widespread disruptions for millions globally. A similar, broader day-long outage occurred last year due to a faulty update from a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike.
Thousands of clients, from startups to large enterprises, depend on Amazon Web Services for critical, data-intensive operations, including streaming video, hosting web applications, and secure digital storage.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, speculated that Monday’s problem likely originated from a technical fault within one of Amazon’s primary data centers. He noted the inherent lack of transparency in cloud platform operations, making the root cause difficult to ascertain without official disclosure from Amazon.
Dr. Halpin recounted receiving numerous emails from soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine, asking about the disruption. He stressed that governments, many of whom also rely on these cloud services, face similar vulnerabilities.
He argued that such dependence creates an ‘exceedingly dangerous situation’ when an entire nation’s infrastructure is concentrated among a few U.S.-based providers, especially if services can fail due to either malicious intent or simple technical errors. ‘Everyone takes it for normal,’ Dr. Halpin commented on this reliance, ‘But it’s not normal.’
Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University in England, confirmed that Amazon’s ‘us-east-1’ region in Northern Virginia houses one of its largest data centers, making it a critical point. While cloud computing generally functions well for daily tasks, he warned that even a minor error, such as a flawed update, could bring down the entire system.
Media advocacy groups underscored the outage’s impact on secure communication apps like Signal and other digital tools, calling for an urgent need to diversify cloud computing providers.
Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, stated that ‘The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.’
Despite the widespread disruption, Amazon’s share price saw minimal movement in premarket trading, suggesting investors were not overly concerned. In the first half of the year, AWS contributed nearly 20% to Amazon’s overall sales and approximately 60% of its operating profit.
Amazon’s global cloud-computing infrastructure allows clients to scale their operations up or down flexibly without the substantial investment typically required for proprietary hardware.
Rebecca Wright, a computer science professor at Barnard College in New York City, acknowledged the benefits smaller companies gain from AWS’s specialized expertise. While recognizing the trade-offs, she maintained that advising companies against outsourcing cybersecurity to experts is not a viable solution.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company, recalled that two decades ago, most companies managed their own data centers. Today, the majority rely on cloud services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Chinese providers. However, rising costs have recently led some companies to reconsider self-hosting their infrastructure.
This latest outage might intensify calls for companies and governments to prioritize hosting cloud services within their respective geographic regions.
Alexandra Geese, a German Member of the European Parliament, asserted after Monday’s disruption that crucial European data and digital infrastructure should reside in Europe, managed by European companies under EU jurisdiction.
She concluded that the outage served as a ‘stark reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience.’