A widespread outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), the powerful cloud service provider that underpins much of the internet, brought numerous websites and applications to a halt for over two hours on Monday. This event once again exposed the inherent fragility of our global technology infrastructure.
The disruption, which impacted services for major banks, popular gaming platforms, and entertainment providers, began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon reported that most services were slowly returning to normal, though they continued to process a significant backlog of requests.
Many widely used services were hit, including WhatsApp, the official British government website and its tax services, payment platform Venmo, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and even games hosted by The New York Times. Amazon itself experienced interruptions, alongside other major brands like Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells, the game Fortnite, and McDonald’s.
The exact cause of the outage remained unclear immediately after the event, with no initial indications of a cyberattack. Amazon’s initial reports pointed to an ‘operational’ issue affecting multiple services in its Northern Virginia region.
Technology experts quickly noted that this incident underscored how heavily the internet depends on a handful of major providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When one experiences problems, millions of users worldwide face disruptions. This echoes last year’s extensive, day-long internet outage, which was triggered by a flawed software update from the lesser-known cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.
Amazon Web Services serves thousands of clients who rely on its robust infrastructure for complex, data-intensive operations, such as streaming video, hosting web applications, and securely storing vast amounts of digital information. By utilizing AWS’s global network, companies can scale their services without needing to invest heavily in their own expensive hardware.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, suggested that a technical fault within one of Amazon’s primary data centers might have been the cause. However, he emphasized the inherent lack of transparency in cloud platform operations, making it impossible to confirm the exact nature of the problem, including the possibility of a cyberattack, without Amazon’s full disclosure.
Dr. Halpin, whose company provides VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, recounted waking up to urgent emails from front-line personnel seeking answers about the disruption. He stressed that this vulnerability extends to many Western governments that also depend on such cloud services.
“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,” added Dr. Halpin, a former research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to the internet’s deep reliance on a select few 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 seamlessly, even a minor error, such as a faulty update, could lead to a complete system breakdown.
Media advocacy groups highlighted that the outage, which also affected secure communication apps like Signal and other essential digital tools, demonstrates a pressing need for greater diversification within the cloud computing landscape.
“When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it,” stated Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy organization.
She further asserted, “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
Despite the widespread impact, Amazon’s share price showed minimal movement in premarket trading, indicating that investors were not overly concerned by the incident. Notably, Amazon Web Services contributed nearly 20 percent of Amazon’s total sales and a substantial 60 percent of its operating profit in the first half of the year.
Mehdi Daoudi, founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company, observed a shift: two decades ago, many companies maintained their own data centers. Today, most rely on giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Chinese providers for cloud services. However, rising costs associated with these services have recently prompted some organizations to reconsider and bring parts of their infrastructure back in-house.
This latest outage could intensify calls for companies and governments to prioritize cloud services hosted within their own geographical regions.
Alexandra Geese, a German member of the European Parliament, responded to Monday’s disruption by advocating for critical European data and digital infrastructure to be hosted by European companies under E.U. jurisdiction.
The outage, she declared, served as a “stark reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience.”