Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed Monday evening that its cloud services had largely returned to normal operations following a daylong, massive global outage that disrupted thousands of websites, major applications, and critical business functions.
The incident, centered on AWS’s key US-EAST-1 data center in Northern Virginia, underscored the profound vulnerability of interconnected global digital infrastructure and reignited calls for stronger fault tolerance measures.
AWS, the world’s largest cloud provider, is a foundational digital backbone for companies, governments, and individuals globally. The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted ordinary tasks ranging from purchasing airline tickets to using digital payment services. The scale of the event was the largest since a malfunction at CrowdStrike last year caused a widespread systems failure across technology, banking, and aviation sectors.
Root Cause and Technical Faults
The initial problems began shortly after 3 a.m. ET (12 a.m. PT), with AWS first reporting an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services. The disruption stemmed from a specific, critical geographic location. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS’s US-EAST-1 cluster in Northern Virginia—one of the oldest and most important cloud hubs—contributed to a major internet meltdown. Amazon has not publicly addressed requests for clarity regarding the recurring impact on this particular data center.
AWS later pinpointed the underlying technical fault. According to an official Monday morning post, the “root cause” of the outage was an “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers” that are used to distribute traffic across servers.
The issue, which originated from within the “EC2 internal network”—Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” service—prevented applications from locating the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data. The problem was related to the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates web addresses into machine-readable IP addresses. While AWS stated that the database problem was “fully mitigated” at 6:35 a.m. ET, it confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region” later in the morning.
By Monday afternoon, AWS reported a significant recovery. Shortly after 3 p.m. PT (11:00 p.m. GMT), Amazon posted an update stating, “all AWS services returned to normal operations.” However, the company acknowledged that full recovery would be gradual for some systems.
“Some services, such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect, would ‘continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours,'” the AWS post stated. Lingering issues were also reported for services like Apple Music and FanDuel into the early evening.
The disruption led to a massive backlog of user-submitted reports on Downdetector, with the service receiving 6.5 million reports globally that more than 1,000 sites and services were offline.
Impact on Global Business and Society
The outage rapidly cascaded, disabling or degrading a vast range of popular apps, websites, and platforms. Financial and technology services were among the hardest hit, with the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, confirming its services were unavailable due to the outage. The trading app Robinhood and the payments app Venmo also experienced issues. Other high-profile services affected included:
- Social & Media: Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, The New York Times, Disney, Hulu, Spotify.
- Gaming: PlayStation, Fortnite, Roblox.
- Retail & Logistics: Amazon, Starbucks, McDonald’s app, Lyft, DoorDash, Ring doorbell cameras.
- Government & Healthcare: Medicare login issues, British government’s HM Revenue and Customs website, United Healthcare’s provider search tool.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimated the total financial impact to be substantial. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed—from airlines to factories,” Daoudi said in a statement to CNN.
Expert Warnings and Calls for Resilience
The event prompted serious concern over the concentration of global internet infrastructure in the hands of a few major cloud providers.
Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, stressed the need for software developers to design more robust systems. Birman noted that AWS offers tools for developers to protect against single-point-of-failure issues and that creating backups with other cloud providers is also an option.
“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 scrutinized later,” Birman told Reuters.
George Foley, Technical Advisor at ESET Ireland, also emphasized resilience: “When one of the major cloud platforms goes down, it reminds everyone how interconnected modern business systems have become. Even if your own website or app isn’t hosted on AWS, there’s a good chance something you use from your CRM to your payment processor is. Outages like this highlight the importance of having resilience plans in place, including backups and alternative routes for essential data and services.”
Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital at the nongovernmental organization Article 19, which promotes freedom of expression, warned of the democratic consequences of such large-scale disruptions. “These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures,” she said. “When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it—media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles.”
Billion-Dollar impact of cloud dependency
As the AWS disruption affected millions, it highlighted a troubling reality that digital infrastructure relies on surprisingly fragile foundations. AWS confirmed “significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” adding that the issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well.
This disruption at Amazon’s North Virginia data centers impacted core services including DynamoDB and EC2: the database and computing foundations that thousands of companies rent to power their applications. When these foundational services fail, it creates an immediate and widespread ripple effect, impacting everything from gaming platforms to banking applications.
his outage serves as yet another stark reminder of a cloud computing reality: the infrastructure behind digital services are far more fragile than most users realize. With 76% of global respondents to a 2024 survey reportedly running applications on AWS and the platform powering more than 90% of Fortune 100 companies, the question is not whether outages will occur, but about the impact of them when they eventually do. Internet disruptions inflict billions of dollars in annual losses through subsequent impacts on revenue streams, slumps in productivity and damaged reputation, with major worldwide outages individually known to exceed a billion dollars in costs.
Recurring outage paattern
This is not the first time an AWS outage has caused catastrophic disruption. The cloud giant has been at the center of numerous major outages—including a December 2021 incident that caused chaos for Amazon customers.
Last June, a problem with AWS Lambda affected major organizations including The Boston Globe and the Associated Press. This shows that even the most sophisticated infrastructure at the industry’s biggest names remains susceptible to failure. Similar issues have plagued rivals; in January 2023, a Microsoft Azure outage wiped out Teams, 365, and Outlook thanks to network issues. Another July 2025 Outlook outage lasted 19 hours, leaving millions unable to access email—showcasing how downtime costs encompass more than just inconvenience, as, in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, such disruptions can compromise audit trails and jeopardize compliance standards.