Amazon AWS Outage Disrupts Global Services, Now Restored After Major Internet Meltdown

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has fully restored operations after a widespread outage on Monday that disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide, including Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, and Zoom. The outage, originating from AWS’s northern Virginia data center (US-EAST-1), caused significant global downtime, halting online services from London to Tokyo and highlighting the fragility of the world’s digital infrastructure.

According to Amazon, the issue stemmed from a malfunction in an internal subsystem monitoring network health within its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. This affected the Domain Name System (DNS), preventing applications from locating AWS’s DynamoDB API—a key cloud database used to store user data. By 3 p.m. PT, AWS announced all services were back to normal, though some systems like AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continued clearing message backlogs.

Experts say the outage underscores growing dependency on major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. “This outage highlights how fragile our digital infrastructures are,” said Jake Moore of ESET. Cornell professor Ken Birman emphasized that developers must build better fault tolerance and avoid cutting corners to save costs.

The incident impacted over a thousand companies and millions of users, with Downdetector logging more than 4 million reports. In the UK, major banks, telecoms, and government services were affected, while apps such as Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, Duolingo, Coinbase, and Robinhood went offline. Even Amazon’s own platforms, including Prime Video and Alexa, experienced disruptions.

Despite the chaos, Wall Street remained calm, with Amazon shares rising 1.6% to $216.48. The outage serves as a stark reminder of how interconnected the digital ecosystem has become—and how one cloud failure can ripple across the globe.