Internet users worldwide experienced widespread disruptions on Monday due to a problem with Amazon’s cloud computing service in the United States. The outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) affected numerous major online operations, including the social‑media app Snapchat, video games Roblox and Fortnite, and platforms such as Airbnb. Several banks in the United Kingdom were also impacted, and some of Amazon’s own services—such as Ring doorbell cameras and Prime Video—were affected as well. Users reported failures throughout the day on DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Approximately three hours after the disruption began, AWS announced that it was starting to recover. The company provides behind‑the‑scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities, and businesses. AWS attributed the outage to issues with its domain name system, which translates web addresses into IP addresses for websites and apps to load on devices connected to the internet.
Cybersecurity expert Patrick Burgess of the UK‑based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, noted that the world’s reliance on a handful of companies for internet infrastructure makes incidents like this highly impactful across many online services. This is not the first time Amazon’s core services have caused widespread disruption. In 2023, a brief breakdown affected many popular internet operations, and in 2021 AWS experienced its longest recent outage, lasting over five hours.
Amazon’s rivals are also susceptible to similar challenges. A July 2024 outage affecting Microsoft Windows computers disrupted airports, hospitals, and organizations worldwide, with an estimated 8.5 million systems crashing and unable to restart. The incident underscores the significance of cloud‑computing infrastructure and the potential consequences of disruptions to these services. As reliance on online operations grows, the importance of robust, reliable cloud infrastructure cannot be overstated, and outages at a few key providers such as Amazon and Microsoft can have far‑reaching, significant impacts.
Comments are closed for this story.