Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced late Monday that it had repaired a massive outage that disrupted access to thousands of websites and apps across the world.
More than 1,000 platforms — including Snapchat and major banks like Lloyds and Halifax — went offline after technical problems hit Amazon’s core cloud systems in the United States. Downdetector, which tracks outages, logged over 11 million reports from frustrated users worldwide.
Experts said the incident revealed the dangers of concentrating so much of the internet’s infrastructure in the hands of a few big companies.
A single fault sends shockwaves through the web
Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey said the outage exposed the fragile structure of modern digital infrastructure. He explained that many services depend on third-party providers for their physical systems. “Even the biggest tech firms are vulnerable, and small human mistakes can have global consequences,” he warned.
The problems started around 07:00 BST on Monday, when users began struggling to access popular services such as Fortnite and Duolingo.
By midday, Downdetector had received more than four million reports from users across 500 different sites — twice the normal weekday total. That number later surged beyond 11 million as platforms like Reddit and Lloyds Bank went down.
By 23:00 BST, Amazon declared all AWS systems fully operational again. The company said it had slowed parts of its internal network to fix the issue at its core.
Technical chain reaction deepened the crisis
Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Notre Dame University, compared the outage to a power grid collapse. He said systems might have briefly recovered before failing again. “It’s possible Amazon fixed surface symptoms before addressing the deeper cause,” he said.
Amazon has not yet given a complete explanation for the problem. In a short update, the company said the issue seemed connected to DNS resolution in its DynamoDB API within the US-EAST-1 region.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts like a digital phone directory by translating website names into numerical codes computers use to locate them. When DNS fails, browsers can’t reach websites, cutting users off entirely.
Growing fears over cloud dominance
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the outage showed how much control large cloud providers have over the world’s digital systems. “Everyone has a bad day, and today it was Amazon’s turn,” he said. “Cloud technology is powerful, but when it breaks, everything depending on it breaks too.”
Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, called the outage “a bridge collapse in the digital economy.” She pointed out that roughly 70% of global cloud computing is handled by just three firms — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
“When such giants fail, vast parts of our economy go down with them,” Crider said. She urged governments and companies to invest in local and independent providers to reduce future risks.
Businesses criticised for weak digital defences
Cornell University professor Ken Birman said companies relying on AWS must take part of the blame. “Too many firms don’t design proper backup systems into their applications,” he said. Outages like this happen often, but most are far smaller.
Birman added that the tools to build resilient systems already exist. “We know how to prevent such failures,” he said. “The problem isn’t technology — it’s that companies avoid the cost of proper safeguards.”
Legal and financial battles could follow
Responsibility for the outage may become a legal issue. After a major CrowdStrike failure last year, Delta Airlines is still seeking over $500 million in damages. Even after the fix, the airline had to manually restart 40,000 servers, causing days of disruption.
The AWS crash is likely to reignite global debate over whether the world has become too dependent on a handful of technology giants — and whether that dependence threatens the stability of the digital economy itself.
