Outage at Amazon Web Services shuts down internet platforms across globe

Internet services around the globe were disrupted on Monday as Amazon Web Services battled severe outages, affecting everything from financial and government websites to airlines and gaming platforms.

The incident shows just how reliant modern societies are on just a few main providers of internet services.

"The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work," Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, said in a statement to CNN.

He estimated the damages could reach billions of dollars.

The outage began around 3 am Eastern Time in one of the company's database centers in Virginia, its oldest and largest site for web services. The company said there were issues with its domain name system, which allows browsers and other applications to load.

Several websites for major companies, including Facebook, Snapchat, Fortnite, Reddit, Lyft, Delta Airlines, McDonald's and Robinhood experienced outages. Many customers were unable to access financial and government services, as well as social media and gaming platforms.

Even Amazon's own website was not able to process orders.

Delta reported some flight delays, and cryptocurrency site Coinbase said its services were unavailable, though the company ensured users that the platform was secure.

"All funds are safe," Coinbase said.

Even several UK government sites were affected, with its revenue and customs services unavailable for a period of time, as were Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom company Vodafone.

The outage prompted some concern in Europe over its reliance on technology based in the United States.

"Europe's dependency on monopoly cloud companies like Amazon is a security vulnerability and an economic threat we can't ignore," Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, told Politico.

Ulrike Franke, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, posted on Bluesky: "My robot vacuum cleaner no longer works and can someone explain why a robot in Paris is linked to US East? Talk about European digital sovereignty…"

Outage monitoring company DownDetector said it was aware of about 9,300 users who were affected globally.

Amazon Web Services is the largest provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for 37 percent of the global market and bringing in revenue of $107 billion. Microsoft and Google are next in terms of revenue, followed by Alibaba Group and Huawei.

"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," said Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for the nongovernmental organization Article 19, which promotes freedom of expression.

Amazon said the problems began with its Elastic Compute Cloud service, which is used to run virtual servers that businesses need to develop, launch and host applications.

By mid-afternoon, Amazon reported that it had fixed the problem, but many websites and internet platforms were still in the process of resuming normal services.

"We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services," Amazon said.

The service previously went down in 2021 and 2023.

"This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold," Mike Chapple, a former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said in a statement.