AWS outage: Amazon Web Services restores operations after global internet outage disrupts major apps
A massive AWS outage on Monday disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide, from Snapchat and Reddit to Zoom and Venmo, before Amazon restored operations later in the day.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) said its cloud platform had returned to normal operations on Monday afternoon after a widespread internet outage crippled thousands of websites and apps across the globe. The disruption, which began earlier in the day, temporarily knocked offline major platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, Zoom, Venmo, and Coinbase, among others.
While AWS confirmed that services were back online by late afternoon, the company noted that some platforms, including AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect, were processing a backlog of messages that would take a few hours to clear.
The outage, which affected users from London to Tokyo, highlighted the dependence of global businesses on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Many workers were unable to perform basic online tasks — from booking flights to making payments.
This incident marks the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, which brought down hospital, banking, and airport systems. It also continues a troubling trend for AWS’s US-EAST-1 cluster in Northern Virginia, which has been the source of multiple major outages in recent years, including those in 2020 and 2021.
Root Cause: Network Health Monitoring Failure
According to AWS, the outage was triggered by an issue in a subsystem that monitors the health of network load balancers — key tools that distribute traffic across multiple servers. The fault originated within Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) internal network, which provides on-demand cloud capacity to clients.
By 3 p.m. PT (2200 GMT), AWS reported that “all services returned to normal operations.”
The US-EAST-1 data center, located in Northern Virginia, is Amazon’s oldest and largest web services site — and a frequent source of issues. AWS documentation shows that the site often serves as the default region for many services, meaning that disruptions there can cascade globally.
The impact of this week's disruption rippled across industries in multiple countries. According to data from Downdetector, over 4 million users worldwide reported issues during the outage.
The AWS disruption hit at least a thousand companies. Popular consumer apps like Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, Duolingo, Signal, and Lyft were all affected.
Even Amazon’s own services — including Prime Video, Alexa, and its shopping website — experienced temporary issues.
Gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans were also impacted, while cryptocurrency and trading services like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Perplexity AI reported connectivity failures.
While most services were back online by late Monday, experts warned that such incidents could become more frequent as more companies rely on a handful of major cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — to power the digital economy.
