A major outage at Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has caused widespread disruption across the internet, affecting over 1,000 companies and leading to millions of user reports of issues.
The blackout began on Monday morning, with services such as the UK government’s login portal, Lloyds Bank, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Amazon’s own Prime Video all experiencing problems. Amazon blamed the incident on a technical issue with the “DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1”, which prevented websites and apps from accessing the data they store on Amazon’s servers.
According to monitoring service Down Detector, the outage generated over 6.5 million reports of problems globally, with more than 800,000 coming from the UK alone – a significant spike from the normal daily average of 160,000. Services such as the National Rail website and app were also impacted.
While Amazon said it had resolved the underlying issue by late morning, some services continued to experience lingering problems. Users of the Ring doorbell system reported being unable to turn off their alarms, while Snapchat users complained that their friend lists had been deleted.
The incident highlights the growing reliance of the internet on a small number of dominant cloud providers like AWS. Grace Harmon of eMarketer warned that “the outage highlights how deeply the internet depends on a few dominant cloud providers” and said we may see more platforms invest in contingency systems to allow users to quickly shift between providers.
This is not the first time a major cloud outage has caused widespread disruption. In 2021, a previous AWS blackout affected dozens of services, while a Microsoft Azure crash in 2024 impacted airlines and train companies. Experts say the trend towards outsourcing IT functions to large tech firms comes with risks, and more companies may look to adopt “multi-cloud” strategies as a safeguard against future failures.