The AWS outage took banking platforms, airlines, media outlets, delivery apps, and a wide range of essential websites and services offline
A large-scale outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) paralyzed a significant portion of the global digital infrastructure for several hours, affecting both large companies and everyday users. The service disruption took banking platforms, airlines, media outlets, delivery apps, and a wide range of essential websites and services offline.
Although the company claimed to have fully mitigated the issue, the impact was massive and once again highlighted the fragility of the digital ecosystem when a single provider experiences failures. Here's what we know so far.
So far, the specific cause behind the outage has not been fully disclosed. However, AWS indicated that the incident stemmed from a problem related to its Domain Name System (DNS), which particularly affected the US-EAST-1 region -- one of the most heavily used areas within Amazon's U.S. data center network. This region hosts numerous critical services and enterprise clients, meaning any failure has wide-reaching consequences.
The first sign of recovery came at 6:35 a.m. ET, when Amazon reported that the problem had been partially resolved and urged affected companies to clear their cache to help bring their platforms back online. However, at 10:29 a.m., the company issued a new alert: API errors and connectivity issues were still present in the same region, suggesting that the situation was not yet fully under control.
The company pointed to its internal EC2 network as the source of the disruption -- a core part of its infrastructure that enables large-scale application deployment. AWS continues to investigate the root cause of the problem while monitoring a gradual service recovery.
Although the incident was centered on Amazon's U.S.-based infrastructure, the domino effect quickly spread worldwide. According to figures from Ookla, the parent company of Down Detector -- a site that tracks digital service disruptions -- 6.5 million user reports were logged during the first hours of the virtual blackout.
The most heavily impacted country was the United States, with over 1.4 million people reporting connectivity issues. In the United Kingdom, reports exceeded 800,000, while the Netherlands and Australia each recorded more than 400,000 incidents. France and Japan were also affected, with over 350,000 users impacted in each country.
The scale of the outage made it clear that AWS is not only critical to North American operations, but its influence spans a significant portion of global digital activity.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud services division and currently leads the global cloud computing market. Founded in 2006, AWS enables businesses, government institutions, and developers to access robust technology infrastructure without needing to invest in their own physical servers.
Through its numerous data centers distributed around the world, AWS provides services including storage, computing power, networking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, security, and more. This on-demand infrastructure allows clients to scale their operations quickly, cut operational costs, and launch digital products with greater agility.
AWS functions as the "invisible engine" behind much of the internet. From startups to multinational corporations, companies rely on its technology to run their services -- meaning even a brief outage can trigger cascading effects across the digital world.
The range of services offered by AWS is both broad and diverse. Among the most widely used are: