Amazon announced on Monday that its systems are back online after a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted the internet, affecting social media platforms, banks, airlines, and several tech firms worldwide.
While the company said most services have recovered, reports suggest that some AWS products, including Lambda, continued to experience issues through the afternoon. The majority of services have recovered according to the company, but some AWS products, like Lambda, were still affected till the afternoon.
The outage, which began on Monday morning, affected a wide range of websites and applications that rely on AWS cloud infrastructure. The platforms that went temporarily offline included Snapchat, Facebook, Fortnite, Roblox, and Duolingo.
Coinbase, among others, US banks and financial institutions also experienced connectivity issues, while large air carriers like Delta and United also had to deal with system disturbances, resulting in flight delays.
The service outage monitoring platform Downdetector registered more than 15,000 global complaints, most of which were in the US-EAST-1 sector, the biggest data-center area of Amazon. The company confirmed increased latency and error rates across multiple AWS services in that region.
By late afternoon, Amazon said it had “fully mitigated the earlier outage” and was observing recovery across all affected services. “We continue to see gradual improvement in connectivity and API performance across AWS,” the company said in a statement on its service-health dashboard.
However, the company acknowledged that Lambda, its serverless computing product, was still returning errors as engineers worked to restore normal operations. AWS also began allowing new instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) after temporarily throttling activity during recovery efforts.
Amazon confirmed that the disturbance came from an internal subsystem, responsible for keeping an eye on the network load balancers’ health, which distributes the traffic among the servers.
The issue led to widespread DNS resolution failures impacting key AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect. The company says it has since implemented fixes and is adding safeguards to prevent it from happening again.
According to Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet-performance firm Catchpoint, the financial impact of the outage could reach “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
He noted that global productivity losses, stalled online transactions, and disrupted operations from airlines to factories illustrate how dependent the modern economy has become on a handful of cloud providers.
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AWS powers a large share of the internet’s backbone, hosting millions of websites and apps worldwide. Monday’s outage underscores the fragility of global digital infrastructure and raises questions about over-reliance on a single provider.
Though Amazon says services have now stabilized, analysts expect scrutiny from enterprises and regulators on cloud resilience in the days ahead.