Amazon Web Services has returned to normal operations, the company said, after an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites on Monday, including some of the web’s most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit.
AWS hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, and the disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. Users on Monday afternoon had complained of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom.
It was the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.
It was at least the third time in five years that AWS’s northern Virginia cluster, known as US-East-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.
Amazon did not address a request for more clarity about why that particular data centre keeps being impacted. The problems stemmed from a domain name system problem that prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data.
Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the “EC2 internal network”, Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS.
Shortly after 3pm US Pacific on Monday (midnight SAST on Tuesday), Amazon said: “All AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.”
Fault tolerance
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers.
“When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn’t really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinised later,” Birman said.
Read: AWS outage knocks out websites worldwide
AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world’s largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms — ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems — that rely on its cloud infrastructure.
AWS said on its status page that Monday’s outage originated at its US-East-1 location, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-East-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.
The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.
“This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET.
Wall Street was largely unfazed, sending Amazon shares 1.6% higher to $216.48. — Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia, with James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa, (c) 2025 Reuters
Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here.
