Major AWS outage disrupts global internet Services

A major service disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud computing platform, caused widespread chaos across the internet today, knocking dozens of major websites, apps, and financial services offline for hours.

The outage was traced to a networking issue within the critically important US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia.

​The disruption, which began early Monday morning (Eastern Time), was quickly felt across the globe by services relying on AWS's foundational infrastructure.

​Root cause identified

AWS initially pointed to increased error rates in its DynamoDB database service, later narrowing the cause down to an underlying internal subsystem responsible for DNS resolution (Domain Name System).

This essential function translates domain names into numerical IP addresses, meaning the failure created a catastrophic domino effect across thousands of linked systems.

​Widespread Impact

The outage crippled a wide array of services, including:

• ​Social Media & Messaging: Snapchat, Reddit, and Signal

• Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, and Clash of Clans

• Financial Services: Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, trading app Robinhood, and payment services Venmo and Chime

  
  

• Retail & Smart Home: Amazon’s own shopping site, Prime Video, Alexa smart speakers, and Ring doorbell cameras all faced service disruptions.

Recovery underway amid throttling

AWS engineers were engaged in a continuous effort to mitigate the issue throughout the day, providing periodic updates via the AWS Health Dashboard.

By late afternoon, AWS confirmed that the underlying DNS issue had been "fully mitigated," and that most services were seeing significant signs of recovery.

However, the company cautioned that some requests may be throttled as systems work through a backlog of queued requests.

The incident is the first major global internet disruption since the CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024. The scale of the failure once again highlights the fragility of the highly concentrated cloud infrastructure that underpins much of the modern internet.