A significant disruption originating from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the dominant cloud service provider supporting a vast portion of the internet, led to hundreds of websites and applications being taken offline for more than two hours on Monday. This event serves as the latest reminder of how vulnerable our global technology infrastructure truly is.
The outage, which impacted a wide array of services including major banks, gaming platforms, and entertainment apps, began shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time. By 5:27 a.m., Amazon confirmed that most services relying on its cloud infrastructure were gradually returning to normal operations, though engineers continued to address a backlog of requests.
Among the prominent services affected were WhatsApp, the official British government website and its tax services, the payment application Venmo, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and even games hosted by The New York Times. Numerous other corporations and retailers, including Amazon’s own platforms, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring smart doorbells, and McDonald’s, also reported service interruptions.
The precise cause of the outage remained unclear immediately after the event, and there were no initial indications suggesting a cyberattack.
According to experts, this incident once again underscores the internet’s heavy reliance on a select few major technology providers—such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Such concentration means that a breakdown in any single service can lead to widespread disruptions affecting millions of users. Last year, a much broader, daylong internet outage was triggered by a faulty software update distributed by the lesser-known cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.
Amazon Web Services boasts thousands of clients who depend on its robust infrastructure for complex, data-intensive operations, including streaming video, hosting web applications, and secure digital storage. Amazon’s cloud-computing division has established a vast global network, enabling companies to offer their products and services to customers worldwide. By leveraging AWS, clients can efficiently scale their operations up or down without the substantial upfront investment in costly hardware.
In its initial public statement on Monday, Amazon acknowledged issues affecting 28 of its services, particularly within the “US-EAST-1” region, and stated that its engineers were actively working to mitigate the impact and identify the root cause.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, a virtual private network service, suggested that the problem might have stemmed from a technical fault within one of Amazon’s primary data centers. However, he emphasized that the internal operations of cloud platforms are inherently opaque, making it impossible to ascertain the exact cause, including whether it was a cyberattack, unless Amazon provides full disclosure.
Halpin, whose company provides VPN services to soldiers in Ukraine, recounted waking up to a flurry of emails from soldiers on the front lines, inquiring about the disruption. He noted that this issue extends beyond Ukraine, impacting numerous Western governments that also rely heavily on such centralized 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,” Halpin warned.
Dr. Halpin, a former research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, added, “Everyone takes it for normal. But it’s not normal,” referring to the internet’s growing dependence on a handful of providers.
Media advocacy groups echoed these concerns, stating that the outage, which also disrupted secure communication apps like Signal and other digital tools, highlights the risk that the internet’s reliance on a few tech giants poses to free speech.
“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 group. She stressed the urgent need for greater diversification in cloud computing infrastructure.
“The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies,” Cath-Speth concluded.
Despite the widespread disruption, Amazon’s share price showed little movement in premarket trading, indicating that investors were not significantly alarmed by the outage. In the first half of the year, Amazon Web Services contributed nearly 20 percent to Amazon’s total sales and approximately 60 percent of its operating profit.
(Reporting contributed by Melissa Eddy in Berlin and Andrés R. Martínez in Seoul.)