Amazon (AMZN.O) said its AWS cloud services had fully recovered by Monday afternoon following a massive outage that disrupted businesses and websites worldwide, including major platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, and Zoom. While all core systems were back online, Amazon noted that some AWS services still faced a backlog of messages expected to clear within hours.
The outage, which began earlier in the day, briefly knocked thousands of companies offline across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, halting digital payments, travel bookings, and business operations. It was the largest internet disruption since the CrowdStrike crash of 2024, underscoring the fragility of global cloud infrastructure.
According to Amazon, the failure originated in the US-EAST-1 region — AWS’s oldest and largest data center cluster in northern Virginia, which has suffered similar incidents in 2020 and 2021. The root cause was traced to a malfunction in the subsystem monitoring network health for its Elastic Load Balancers, which distribute web traffic across multiple servers.
AWS explained that the issue began within its EC2 internal network, disrupting the Domain Name System (DNS) used to connect services to their databases, including the DynamoDB API, which stores critical user data.
Experts said the incident exposes the world’s dependence on a few dominant cloud providers. “This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” said Jake Moore, cybersecurity advisor at ESET. Nishanth Sastry, of the University of Surrey, added that the disruption showed “the risk of relying on just one service provider.”
The outage’s ripple effects hit a wide range of sectors. Financial institutions including Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and HMRC, as well as telecom firms BT and Vodafone, reported temporary downtime in the UK. In the U.S., Coinbase, Robinhood, Perplexity, and Lyft experienced interruptions, while gaming services like Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash Royale also went dark. Even Amazon’s own Prime Video, Alexa, and shopping platform were affected.
Despite the chaos, Wall Street shrugged off the disruption, sending Amazon shares up 1.6% to $216.48 by market close. Experts estimate that hours of cloud downtime can translate into millions of dollars in lost productivity for large companies, a reminder of the growing risks in the digital economy.