A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday disrupted operations for millions of users worldwide, knocking out access to everything from streaming giants to social media platforms and financial apps.
The incident, which began early in the morning, affected high-profile services like Amazon’s own e-commerce site, Snapchat, Prime Video, Canva, and countless others reliant on AWS infrastructure.
Banks such as Capital One and airlines including Delta reported intermittent downtime, while delivery apps like DoorDash and media outlets faced loading delays. Frustrated users took to social media ironically, platforms like Twitter (now X) that weren’t directly hit—to share screenshots of error messages and frozen screens.
The ripple effects were immediate and far-reaching. Snapchat users couldn’t refresh their feeds or send snaps, Prime Video subscribers encountered buffering issues during peak viewing hours, and Canva’s design tools became unresponsive for creators mid-project.
Even lesser-known services, from indie game developers to small business websites, ground to a halt. “It’s like the internet’s backbone snapped,” one tech analyst tweeted, highlighting how AWS’s dominance in cloud computing amplifies such failures.
By midday, reports estimated the outage cost affected companies millions in lost productivity and revenue.
At the heart of this outage was DynamoDB, AWS’s popular NoSQL database service that stores vast troves of customer data for apps and websites. Amazon confirmed that access to DynamoDB was impaired due to a Domain Name System (DNS) failure within its ecosystem.
DNS acts as the internet’s address book, translating human-readable URLs like “amazon.com” into numerical IP addresses that devices use to connect. When this “location engine” faltered, it created a cascade: services couldn’t resolve addresses, blocking data retrieval from DynamoDB and halting operations across dependent platforms.
Recovery InProgress
AWS engineers worked swiftly to mitigate the issue, restoring partial service to most regions by early afternoon. The company issued a statement apologizing for the inconvenience and promising a full root-cause analysis.
“We’re investigating and will share more details soon,” an AWS spokesperson said. While no cyberattack was suspected pointing instead to an internal configuration error the event underscores the risks of over-reliance on a single provider.
For businesses, this serves as a stark reminder to diversify cloud strategies. As outages like this expose vulnerabilities in our hyper-connected world, experts urge enhanced redundancy measures to prevent future blackouts from derailing daily life.
Update: According to the recent status page update, most of the servies are active and the engineers actively working to address the issues.
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