Global Internet Disruption as Amazon Cloud Outage Exposes Digital Dependence
Tech experts have cautioned for years that big cloud platforms are now among the world’s critical infrastructure, and disruptions therefore carry wide economic
The DNS failure, respectively, affected Amazon's Network Load Balancer, a service used to distribute traffic among cloud servers. Phot/ Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
By Juliet Jerotich
A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption on Monday caused widespread outages across the globe, bringing down a myriad of online sites and digital services for several hours. The outage pointed to the extent to which the contemporary internet ecosystem is dependent on Amazon’s vast cloud infrastructure.
The outage, which began early Tuesday, hit some of the world’s most widely used websites and apps — including Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Airbnb, Snapchat, Duolingo, and Fortnite. Users also reported issues with Amazon’s own retail website, while several banks like Lloyd’s blamed AWS for their service outages. In Europe, mobile phone networks and messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal also collapsed, according to data from Downdetector, which tracks online outages.
Amazon updated its service status page to indicate that the issue had been resolved and that systems were gradually returning to “pre-event levels.” The company warned, however, that it would take some time to work off the data backlog that had built up during the outage. Although the number of problem reports fell off sharply by late Monday, users were continuing to report intermittent disruptions nearly 18 hours after the original event.
According to Amazon, the root cause of the outage was due to a Domain Name System (DNS) failure — a basic component of internet infrastructure that acts as a digital phonebook, directing web traffic to the correct servers. The DNS failure, respectively, affected Amazon’s Network Load Balancer, a service used to distribute traffic among cloud servers. In trying to stabilize the situation, AWS engineers throttled operations while they tried to resume normal operations.
The outage had a massive global effect. Downdetector tallied over 11 million issue reports during the outage, a reflection of the magnitude of the effect. Amazon engineers noticed the issue at 0711 GMT when they observed very high error rates in a number of services. Although the system was restarted later in the day, the cascading effects took hours to resolve as millions of requests had been stalled and delayed.
Financial analyst Michael Hewson said the incident showed a worrying dependence on a handful of tech giants. “This shows how much the world has come to depend on the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for online services we now take for granted,” he commented. “Economically, it is a case of putting all your eggs in one basket.”
AWS presently controls roughly a third of the worldwide cloud framework market, trailed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. That implies millions of organizations, governments, and individuals depend on it every day — from banking and streaming to health frameworks and government sites. In fact, the UK government’s official entryways were among those hit by Monday’s blackout.
Tech experts have cautioned for years that big cloud platforms are now among the world’s critical infrastructure, and disruptions therefore carry wide economic and security implications. Jacob Bourne, senior analyst with Emarketer, stated that as dependence on cloud computing grows, any future outages would have even larger implications for industries and governments.
This latest failure comes only a few months after a July 2024 global outage resulting from a buggy software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which ground operations to a halt in airports, hospitals, and companies across the world. The failure affected around 8.5 million devices, inducing the infamous “blue screen of death” on Windows machines.
Monday’s AWS incident, while shorter-lived, reinforced the same warning: the digital world’s most essential systems are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few cloud providers — making resilience, redundancy, and diversification more important than ever.
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