In one of the most significant internet disruptions of the year, Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage that crippled thousands of websites and applications worldwide, exposing the world’s heavy reliance on a handful of US cloud providers.
The outage, which originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 data centre in North Virginia, its oldest and largest hub left popular platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox & Fortnite offline for hours.
Financial institutions such as Lloyds, Halifax & Bank of Scotland, along with telecom operators including Vodafone & BT, also faced severe interruptions. Even Amazon’s own services, including Prime Video, Alexa & its shopping platform, were affected.
The disruption was traced to a Domain Name System failure a seemingly routine technical glitch that caused a massive breakdown in traffic routing.
DNS acts as the internet’s map, guiding users requests to the correct destinations. When AWS lost its bearings, millions of devices could no longer locate the platforms they were trying to access.
AWS confirmed the issue and admitted to significant API errors & connectivity issues across multiple services. To stabilise recovery, it imposed temporary limits on platform requests. Although several apps began coming back online after 6 hours, elevated errors persisted well into the day.
Experts have called the incident a textbook example of the risks posed by the over centralisation of internet infrastructure.
AWS powers roughly a third of the world’s online ecosystem & its clients include governments, corporations & startups.
With only 2 real global competitors, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud the scale of dependence on AWS leaves businesses and public systems vulnerable to single-point failures.
The outage has reignited debate across Europe & the UK about building independent digital infrastructure & reducing reliance on US cloud giants.
Some argue it’s already too late, while others insist that incidents like this prove the urgency of diversification & stronger resilience planning.
The event follows similar breakdowns in recent years, including major outages in 2020 & 2021 at the same AWS facility, raising questions about systemic fragility & preparedness within the world’s most dominant cloud provider.
