Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage that disrupted thousands of websites and apps across the globe — including big names and even some Amazon services like Prime Video and Alexa. By Monday afternoon, AWS confirmed everything was returning to normal, although some services still had message backlogs to clear.
The issue came from AWS’s US-EAST-1 data centre in Northern Virginia — the same region that’s caused major problems before in 2020 and 2021. This time, the problem was linked to DNS failures. You can think of DNS (Domain Name System) like a phonebook that turns domain names like ours truly, into an IP address that can communicate with other computers.
Pretty huge, to say the least. Businesses and users from London to Tokyo were hit. Workers couldn’t access tools, people couldn’t book flights, pay hairdressers or even log into everyday apps. Over 4 million outage reports were recorded according to Downdetector.
In the UK, big names like Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT and HMRC’s website were affected. Apps like Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, Coinbase, Robinhood and more were taken offline or partially disrupted.
Experts are calling out the fragility of global cloud infrastructure. With so many companies relying on just a handful of cloud providers, a single fault can cause chaos. AWS’s US-EAST-1 is one of its most used regions — and also one of its most problematic.
This outage is a reminder of how dependent we all are on cloud services. From banking and government sites to gaming and streaming. If AWS stumbles, the internet feels it.
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