A recent major incident involving Amazon Web Services (AWS), the dominant cloud service provider powering much of the internet, led to hundreds of websites and applications going offline for over two hours. This event served as a stark reminder of the delicate nature of our global technology infrastructure.
The disruption, which impacted services for prominent banks, popular gaming platforms, and entertainment providers, began in the early hours of Monday morning, Eastern time. By mid-morning, Amazon reported that most affected services were back online, though they were still processing a backlog of requests.
However, throughout Monday afternoon Eastern time, various reports continued to indicate intermittent service issues across several platforms.
Among the many services hit were WhatsApp, key British government websites and tax functions, the payment application Venmo, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, various games, and major news websites. A wide array of other businesses, including Amazon’s own platforms, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald’s, Ring doorbells, and the popular game Fortnite, also faced interruptions.
According to Down Detector, a service monitoring internet outages, there were over eight million reports related to Amazon Web Services by late morning Eastern time, with a significant number originating from the United States and Britain.
Amazon later clarified that its initial investigation pointed to an internal system issue in Northern Virginia, which affected how traffic was distributed across its extensive network.
Industry experts emphasized that this event once again highlighted the internet’s heavy reliance on a select few technology giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Such centralization means that a single point of failure can trigger widespread chaos for millions of users. This echoed a similar, broader internet disruption last year caused by a flawed software update from a cybersecurity firm.
Thousands of organizations depend on Amazon Web Services for critical, data-intensive operations, including video streaming, running complex web applications, and securely storing vast amounts of digital information.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, suggested that Monday’s problem likely stemmed from a technical glitch at one of Amazon’s primary data centers. He noted the inherent lack of transparency in cloud platform operations, making the precise cause unknowable unless Amazon publicly discloses it.
Dr. Halpin recounted receiving numerous urgent emails from soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine, whose VPN services his company provides, inquiring about the disruption. He stressed that many governments globally also depend on these same centralized cloud services.
“If an entire nation’s digital backbone relies on a handful of providers, all located in one country, and any of these can fail at any moment—whether due to malicious intent or simple technical errors—that presents an incredibly perilous situation,” he warned.
“Everyone has come to view this reliance as normal,” Dr. Halpin observed, speaking about the internet’s concentrated dependence. “But it is far from normal.”
Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer, pointed out that Amazon’s “us-east-1” region in Northern Virginia, where the incident occurred, houses one of its largest data centers. He explained that while cloud computing generally works well for daily tasks, even a minor error, like an incorrect update, can bring an entire system down.
Media advocacy groups asserted that this outage, which also interrupted secure communication platforms and other digital tools, underscores a pressing need for greater diversification in cloud computing services.
“The foundational infrastructure supporting democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications should not be monopolized by a few corporations,” stated Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for a free speech advocacy organization.
Interestingly, despite the extensive disruption, Amazon’s share price saw little movement in premarket trading, indicating that investors were not overly concerned by the incident. In the first half of the year, AWS alone contributed nearly 20% of Amazon’s total sales and approximately 60% of its operating profit.
Amazon’s cloud computing arm boasts a vast global infrastructure. Clients choose AWS because it allows them to easily scale their operations up or down without the massive investment typically required for proprietary hardware.
Rebecca Wright, a computer science professor, noted that smaller companies particularly benefit from using cloud service providers like AWS due to their specialized expertise. “While there are certainly trade-offs, I wouldn’t advise companies to avoid outsourcing cybersecurity to experts in the field,” she commented.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of an internet performance monitoring company, recalled that two decades ago, most businesses maintained their own data centers. Today, he explained, the majority rely on cloud services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Chinese tech firms. However, rising costs over the past few years have led some companies to consider returning to their own infrastructure.
This latest outage could intensify calls for businesses and governments to prioritize regional cloud services.
Following Monday’s disruption, Alexandra Geese, a German member of the European Parliament, asserted that vital European data and digital infrastructure should be hosted within Europe by European companies, operating under EU jurisdiction.
She concluded that the outage served as a “powerful reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not merely an abstract concept, but a fundamental aspect of security and resilience.”