Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced late Monday that it had fixed a massive outage that had disrupted some of the world’s biggest websites for most of the day.
More than 1,000 apps and sites – including Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax – went offline due to issues within Amazon’s US cloud operations. The global platform monitor Downdetector reported over 11 million user complaints during the incident.
Experts warned the disruption revealed how dependent modern infrastructure has become on a handful of providers.
A global web blackout exposes fragile digital systems
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the incident showed how deeply intertwined online infrastructure is. He explained that many digital services depend on third-party systems and even the largest providers can fail. “Small mistakes, often caused by people, can trigger widespread and severe consequences,” he said.
The outage began around 07:00 BST on Monday as users struggled to access a wide range of services. Affected sites included games like Fortnite and apps such as Duolingo.
Early reports showed more than four million issues across 500 websites within hours—twice the normal volume seen on a weekday. As the day progressed, problems spread further, hitting Reddit and Lloyds Bank among others.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon confirmed that all AWS services had returned to normal. The company had temporarily restricted parts of its own network to repair the underlying problem.
Experts suspect cascading failures and deep-rooted issues
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the event to a power grid failure. He said the system may have briefly come back online before faltering again. According to him, Amazon might have first fixed only the visible symptoms instead of the deeper cause.
Amazon has not yet provided full details about the source of the outage. In a short update, it said the problem appeared linked to DNS resolution for the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, functions like a phone book for the internet. It converts website names into numerical addresses that computers can read. When DNS fails, browsers cannot locate web content, effectively cutting users off from online services.
The power of cloud giants raises serious concerns
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the event highlighted how much influence cloud providers have over the internet. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s turn,” he remarked. “The cloud lets companies grow fast, but an outage can bring down many essential services.”
Cori Crider from the Future of Technology Institute compared the disruption to a collapsing bridge. “An essential part of the economy has fallen apart,” she said. With around 70% of cloud computing controlled by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, she argued this concentration is unsustainable.
“When a few dominant providers fail, a large share of the economy collapses with them,” Crider warned. She urged governments and companies to rely more on local or diverse cloud providers to strengthen resilience.
Responsibility and lessons for dependent companies
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said part of the blame lies with firms that use AWS. “Many companies haven’t built enough backup systems into their applications,” he said. Outages happen regularly, though few reach this scale.
Birman explained that developers can strengthen their systems if they invest in proper safeguards. “We already know how to make these systems stronger and more secure,” he said.
Potential legal consequences after major disruptions
Questions of responsibility could end up in court. Following a similar issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, Delta Airlines is still trying to recover more than $500 million in losses over a year later. Even after the problem was fixed, the airline had to manually reset 40,000 servers, causing flight delays that lasted several days.
The Amazon outage may reignite debates about whether the digital world has become too reliant on a few massive technology providers—and what that means for the resilience of the global economy.
