A major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted global internet infrastructure early Monday, affecting scores of popular websites, apps, and platforms used daily by millions. Though AWS reported that the issue was “fully mitigated” by early morning Eastern Time, users continued to report lingering disruptions across a range of services.
The outage began shortly after midnight Pacific Time and stemmed from Domain Name System (DNS) issues linked to DynamoDB, a core AWS database service. AWS’s primary US-East-1 region was hardest hit, setting off a chain reaction across services relying on the cloud provider.
Major companies affected included Amazon itself, Disney+, Lyft, McDonald’s, The New York Times, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Venmo, and Verizon. In the UK, government services such as Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs also went offline temporarily, according to reports from Downdetector.
Financial institutions and platforms were not spared. Lloyds Banking Group acknowledged service disruptions, and users of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, were locked out. Popular online games like Fortnite and Roblox also faced interruptions, as did cloud-based platforms like Canva and AI search engine Perplexity.
AWS stated that “multiple parallel paths” were being used to resolve the issue. By 6:35 a.m. ET, they confirmed that services were recovering, though some requests continued to be throttled as full resolution efforts remained underway.
This outage underscores the global dependency on a few dominant cloud providers—namely AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. A single disruption can cascade across sectors, halting everything from financial transactions to government operations.
While there is no current evidence of a cyberattack, cybersecurity experts stressed that companies must prepare for such failures with stronger backup systems and redundancy planning. The incident again raises critical questions about centralized control of internet infrastructure and the vulnerabilities it creates.
