A widespread disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday caused several high-profile apps, websites, and banking platforms to go offline for hours before the issue was finally resolved later in the night. The outage, which affected one of Amazon’s main cloud regions in the United States, drew attention to how heavily the global digital infrastructure depends on a few large cloud service providers.
According to Amazon’s official update, the problem stemmed from a technical fault in its Domain Name System (DNS) — a core internet function that translates website names into numerical addresses that computers can read. When the DNS experiences interruptions, browsers and applications lose their ability to locate and connect with servers, causing widespread loading failures. The company confirmed the issue affected its DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region, one of its busiest hubs.
The first reports of disruptions appeared around 7:00 a.m. BST on Monday, when users began facing difficulties accessing multiple platforms. As the issue spread, users of services such as Snapchat, Fortnite, and Duolingo were unable to log in or perform basic functions. Several banking websites, including Lloyds and Halifax, also reported temporary connectivity problems.
The outage quickly escalated to a global scale. According to the monitoring website Downdetector, more than 11 million user complaints were recorded throughout the day, an unprecedented figure that reflected the magnitude of the disruption. Early in the incident, Downdetector noted over four million reports from more than 500 affected platforms within just a few hours, which was more than double its usual weekday average.
AWS engineers worked through the day to isolate the source of the issue and restore affected systems. To stabilize its network, Amazon temporarily limited some internal operations to prevent further cascading failures. By 11:00 p.m. BST, the company announced that all services had “returned to normal operations.”
Experts said the incident underlined the vulnerabilities of an increasingly centralized internet. Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey explained that modern online systems are highly interdependent, meaning that an error within one major provider can ripple across numerous unrelated services. “Even small technical mistakes can trigger large-scale failures,” he said, pointing out how human or software missteps in one corner of the infrastructure can have global consequences.
Professor Mike Chapple from the University of Notre Dame compared the recovery process to restoring electricity after a large power outage. He said the system might “flicker” several times as engineers fix underlying causes and bring services gradually back online.
Industry observers say such incidents reflect a growing systemic risk within the cloud computing sector, which is dominated by a handful of major firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively controlling nearly 70% of the market. Cori Crider, director of the Future of Technology Institute, described the current model as “unsustainable,” warning that heavy reliance on a few global companies poses economic and security risks for nations and organizations alike.
Other experts suggested that responsibility also lies with companies using these services. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, noted that many organizations fail to develop backup mechanisms to keep essential applications online during provider outages. “We already know how to build more resilient systems,” he said. “The challenge is that many businesses still rely entirely on their cloud providers instead of investing in redundancy.”
Although AWS has not released a detailed technical report yet, its preliminary statement confirmed that the outage originated from a DNS-related fault within its DynamoDB service. The incident, though resolved, highlights a growing concern within the cybersecurity community: as dependence on cloud computing deepens, so does the scale of disruption when a single provider experiences a failure.
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