A major disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread outages across the internet, temporarily disabling or slowing down more than one thousand online services worldwide.
The failure began early on Monday morning in AWS’s US-East-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, which is the company’s oldest and largest data centre hub. This region hosts essential systems used by thousands of businesses and public services around the world.
According to data from Downdetector, the outage led to more than 6.5 million reports of service problems globally. Over one million reports came from the United States in the first two hours, while the United Kingdom recorded more than 800,000. Other affected countries included France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Australia.
Among the companies affected were Snapchat, Duolingo, Reddit, Zoom, Roblox, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and several UK public bodies such as HMRC, National Rail, and parts of the National Health Service. Users reported being unable to log in, send messages, access online accounts, or load website content.
AWS engineers identified the cause of the problem as an error in the Domain Name System (DNS) that disrupted connections to the DynamoDB database service. This system is used to match website names to their numerical internet addresses and to retrieve stored data for online applications. The fault prevented many services from locating and accessing the information they needed to operate.
Amazon stated that the main issue has been resolved and that systems are gradually returning to normal. However, recovery is expected to take additional time as delayed network requests are processed and new virtual servers, known as EC2 instances, are brought back online.
Technical specialists explained that many online platforms depend on the Virginia region as their default hosting location because it offers extensive capacity and lower costs. As a result, a failure in this single area affected businesses and users in multiple continents.
Cybersecurity analysts confirmed that there is no indication of a cyberattack. They described the event as a technical fault within AWS’s infrastructure.
The disruption lasted for several hours and has prompted renewed discussion about the risks of global dependence on a few large cloud service providers.
Experts have suggested that businesses consider hosting systems across multiple regions or providers to reduce the impact of future incidents.
Most affected websites and applications were restored by the end of the day, but the outage revealed how a single point of failure in a large network can temporarily interrupt essential services used by millions of people worldwide.
