A recent outage impacting Amazon Web Services (AWS), the powerful cloud provider behind a vast portion of the internet, caused hundreds of websites and applications to go dark for more than two hours on Monday. This event served as a stark reminder of how interconnected and, ultimately, vulnerable our global digital infrastructure truly is.
The widespread disruption, which began just after 3 a.m. Eastern time, impacted a diverse array of services, including major banks, popular gaming platforms, and various entertainment apps. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon confirmed that most affected sites and applications were back online, though they noted ongoing efforts to clear a backlog of requests.
Among the many popular services caught in the disruption were WhatsApp, the official website and tax services for the British government, payment application Venmo, cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, and even games hosted by a prominent news organization. Numerous other companies and retailers, such as Amazon itself, Hulu, Snapchat, McDonald’s, Ring doorbells, and the popular game Fortnite, also reported significant service interruptions.
According to Down Detector, a service monitoring internet outages, more than 8 million reports linked to Amazon Web Services had poured in by 9:45 a.m. Eastern, with a significant number originating from users in the United States and Britain.
The precise cause of the outage remained unclear, and initial assessments did not suggest a cyberattack. Amazon’s first statements indicated an “operational” issue affecting several of its services within its Northern Virginia data center.
Industry experts emphasized that this event underscored the inherent vulnerability of the internet due to its heavy centralization around a handful of dominant technology providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one of these giants falters, millions of users worldwide can experience service interruptions. This echoed a similar, broader internet outage last year, triggered by a flawed software update from a cybersecurity firm.
Thousands of businesses depend on Amazon Web Services for critical, data-heavy operations such as video streaming, web application hosting, and massive digital data storage. Amazon’s cloud division boasts a vast global infrastructure. Opting for AWS allows clients to effortlessly scale their operations up or down, avoiding substantial investments in their own expensive hardware.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network provider, speculated that Monday’s issue might stem from a technical malfunction within one of Amazon’s primary data centers. However, he highlighted the opaque nature of cloud platform operations, making it challenging to pinpoint the exact cause without Amazon’s official disclosure.
Dr. Halpin noted that his company, which supplies VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, received multiple inquiries from the front lines regarding the disruption. He stressed that this dependence on cloud services extends to many governments globally.
He warned, “When an entire nation’s infrastructure is concentrated among a few providers, primarily located in the United States, and these services can fail at any given moment due to either malicious intent or simple technical glitches, it creates an extremely perilous situation.”
“People have grown accustomed to this reliance,” Dr. Halpin commented on the internet’s heavy dependence on a few key players. “But it’s far from a normal or ideal scenario.”
Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University in England, pointed out that Amazon’s “us-east-1” region in Northern Virginia, the site of Monday’s reported issues, houses one of its most extensive data centers. He acknowledged that “cloud computing generally performs well for daily operations,” but cautioned that even a minor flaw, such as an incorrect software update, has the potential to bring down the entire system.
Media advocacy groups quickly highlighted that this outage, which impacted secure communication tools like Signal and other digital services, underscores an urgent need for greater diversification in cloud computing solutions.
Corinne Cath-Speth, digital head at Article 19, a free speech advocacy organization, stated, “When one provider fails, essential services are lost alongside it.”
She further emphasized, “The foundational infrastructure supporting democratic discussion, independent reporting, and secure communications should not rest in the hands of just a few corporations.”
Despite the incident, Amazon’s share price saw minimal fluctuation in premarket trading, indicating that investors were largely unconcerned by the disruption. In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services was responsible for approximately 20 percent of Amazon’s total sales, yet contributed roughly 60 percent to its operating profit.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring firm, recalled that twenty years ago, many businesses operated their own data centers. Today, he noted, most depend on cloud services from major players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Chinese tech giants. However, he observed a recent trend over the past few years where increasing cloud service costs have encouraged some companies to revert to managing their own infrastructure.
This latest outage is likely to intensify calls for both private companies and public sector entities to prioritize regional cloud services.
Following Monday’s disruption, Alexandra Geese, a German Member of the European Parliament, asserted that Europe’s vital data and digital infrastructure should be hosted by European companies within Europe, under the clear jurisdiction of the European Union.
She concluded that the outage served as a “potent reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not merely a theoretical idea, but a fundamental aspect of security and resilience.”
Additional reporting was contributed by Melissa Eddy in Berlin, Jeanna Smialek in Brussels, and Andrés R. Martínez in Seoul.