A recent Monday saw Amazon Web Services (AWS) — a critical backbone for countless online services — experiencing significant issues. This disruption led to hundreds of websites and applications, including popular gaming and entertainment platforms, being offline for approximately three hours.
This widespread internet disruption served as a stark reminder of how fragile our global technology infrastructure truly is. It underscored that a single point of failure, especially with a service as ubiquitous as Amazon’s cloud offerings, can bring digital systems worldwide to a grinding halt.
The outages reportedly began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon announced “significant signs of recovery,” confirming that most services were back online. However, they noted that a backlog of requests still needed to be processed, which could cause further delays.
Amazon’s engineers worked diligently to contain the impact and pinpoint the root cause, initially reporting issues across 28 services, notably in the “US-EAST-1” region.
Online outage tracker DownDetector quickly registered problems with dozens of prominent sites, such as Amazon itself, Venmo, Hulu, and McDonald’s, among many others.
Major companies like Coinbase, the cryptocurrency platform, confirmed that their service interruptions were directly linked to the AWS outage. They assured users that all funds remained safe while their team worked on a fix.
Even AI startups like Perplexity reported outages, with CEO Aravind Srinivas confirming that the “root cause is an AWS issue” and that efforts were underway to resolve it.
Interestingly, Amazon’s share price saw little movement in premarket trading, suggesting that investors weren’t overly concerned by the temporary disruption.
While many companies like Delta Air Lines and United Airlines also reported issues to DownDetector, air travel largely remained unaffected, according to FlightAware, with no significant delays or cancellations.
AWS continued to report recovery across most affected sites, stating they were working towards full resolution and would provide further updates. They acknowledged that some services might still experience a lag due to a backlog of work.
Understanding Amazon Web Services
The Monday outage at Amazon Web Services brought hundreds of online services offline, showcasing just how integral this Amazon-owned cloud provider is to the smooth functioning of the internet.
AWS originated from the massive internal technology infrastructure that Amazon built to support its diverse and often unconventional retail needs. This infrastructure proved exceptionally capable of handling a huge volume of users and complex, data-intensive operations, such as streaming video, web applications, and large-scale data storage.
Recognizing the potential to rent these robust capabilities to other organizations, Amazon significantly invested in and expanded these services, offering them to businesses globally.
The extensive list of affected services and applications—including Coinbase, Zoom, Duolingo, Fortnite, and even some games from The New York Times—demonstrates the pervasive reach of AWS in powering today’s internet. Beyond consumer apps, banks, healthcare providers, and transportation companies also rely heavily on AWS.
Amazon’s cloud-computing division boasts infrastructure spread across the globe, enabling companies to make their products accessible worldwide. By subscribing to these services, businesses can effortlessly scale their operations up or down without the need for costly hardware investments.
Impact on Free Speech and Service Recovery
Some media freedom advocates voiced concerns that the AWS outage, which impacted secure communication apps like Signal, underscored the risks to free speech inherent in the internet’s heavy reliance on a few dominant technology companies. Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, an advocacy group, emphasized the urgent need for diversification in cloud computing.
DownDetector indicated that disruptions across dozens of websites were indeed easing, with many sites that had previously reported problems, such as Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, and the British government’s website, showing fewer issues.
Affected Websites and Apps
Hundreds of websites and applications experienced outages on Monday morning, leading to significant disruption across the internet. Here’s a partial list of services that reported issues, as tracked by DownDetector:
- Amazon
- Venmo
- Hulu
- McDonald’s
- Coinbase
- Snapchat
- Ring
- Roblox
- Zoom
- Lloyd’s Bank
- Bank of Scotland
- Signal
- Gov.uk
- Wordle
- Slack
- Canva
- Fortnite
- Tidal
- Duolingo
- Microsoft365
- PokemonGo
- Strava
The broad internet disruption, primarily attributed to Amazon Web Services issues, highlighted the delicate state of global technology infrastructure. This incident illustrated how a problem with one widely used technology component, such as Amazon’s cloud services, can halt systems globally, much like a flawed update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike did in July 2024.
At New York’s LaGuardia Airport, lines grew at airline check-in counters as kiosks and apps went down. Fortunately, airport security lines seemed to be unaffected by technical difficulties.
Meredith Whittaker, CEO of the messaging app Signal, confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that Signal was down for some users, directly linking the issue to the major AWS outage. She advised users to “Stand by.”