A recent widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the powerful cloud provider underpinning a vast portion of the internet, brought countless websites and applications offline for over two hours on Monday. This incident served as yet another stark reminder of just how fragile our global technology infrastructure truly is.
The disruption, which impacted services ranging from major banks and popular gaming platforms to various entertainment apps, began in the early hours, shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon announced that most affected websites and applications were returning to normal operation, though they were still diligently addressing a backlog of pending requests.
The ripple effect of the outage was felt across a wide array of popular services. Platforms like WhatsApp, the official British government website and its tax services, the payment application Venmo, and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase all experienced problems. Even games hosted by The New York Times were impacted. Beyond these, numerous other companies and retailers, such as Amazon, Venmo, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells, the popular game Fortnite, and McDonald’s, reported significant service interruptions.
The precise cause of the outage remained unclear immediately following the event. There were no initial signs pointing to a cyberattack; Amazon’s preliminary reports indicated an ‘operational’ issue impacting several of its services located in Northern Virginia.
Technology experts quickly highlighted how this incident underscored the internet’s critical dependence on a handful of dominant providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one of these giants falters, millions of users worldwide face immediate disruptions. They recalled a similar, more extensive day-long internet outage from the previous year, which stemmed from a flawed software update issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Thousands of clients trust Amazon Web Services for their most complex, data-intensive, and demanding operations. This includes everything from streaming high-definition video and running intricate web applications to securely storing vast quantities of digital information. Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure is strategically deployed across the globe, enabling businesses to effortlessly reach customers worldwide. By leveraging AWS, companies can scale their operations up or down as needed, avoiding the substantial upfront investments in hardware and maintenance that building their own infrastructure would entail.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, suggested the outage might have originated from a technical glitch within one of Amazon’s primary data centers. However, he also emphasized the inherent opaqueness of cloud platform operations, noting that without Amazon’s full disclosure, the exact cause—including the possibility of a cyberattack—remains unknown.
Dr. Halpin, whose company supplies VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, recounted waking to a flurry of emails from troops on the front lines, all inquiring about the cause of the disruption. He stressed that this vulnerability isn’t confined to Ukraine; many other Western governments also heavily depend on these same cloud services, making the problem a widespread concern.
“When an entire nation’s digital infrastructure is concentrated among just a few providers, all based in the United States, and any part of it can fail at any given moment—whether due to malicious activity or simple technical errors—that presents an incredibly perilous situation,” Dr. Halpin warned.
“People have grown to accept this as normal,” commented Dr. Halpin, a former research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reflecting on the internet’s heavy reliance on a select group of providers. “But it’s far from normal.”
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 epicenter of Monday’s reported issues—hosts one of its most extensive data centers. He acknowledged that while cloud computing generally performs well for daily operations, even a minor oversight, such as a problematic software update, has the potential to crash the entire system.
Media advocates quickly seized on the outage, which notably disrupted secure communication apps like Signal and other essential digital tools, as clear evidence for an urgent need to diversify cloud computing infrastructure.
“When a single service provider experiences an outage, vital services inevitably go dark alongside it,” stated Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group.
She further emphasized that the fundamental infrastructure supporting democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications should not be beholden to just a few corporations.
Despite the extensive disruption, Amazon’s share price showed minimal movement in premarket trading, suggesting that investors were largely unfazed by the incident. This muted reaction likely reflects AWS’s significant financial contribution to Amazon, accounting for nearly 20% of its sales but a remarkable 60% of its operating profit in the first half of the year.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of internet performance monitoring company Catchpoint, highlighted a shift in industry trends. He noted that while two decades ago many companies maintained their own data centers, today the majority depend on cloud services from giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or various Chinese firms. Interestingly, he added, the escalating costs associated with these cloud services have recently encouraged some companies to reconsider and return to managing their own infrastructure.
This recent outage could intensify calls for businesses and governments to prioritize using cloud services hosted within their own geographical regions.
Following Monday’s disruption, Alexandra Geese, a German Member of the European Parliament, asserted that Europe’s vital data and digital infrastructure must be hosted within Europe itself, managed by European companies operating 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.’