Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it has restored all systems after a widespread outage crippled more than 1,000 major websites and apps globally on Monday, disrupting everything from social media to banking.
What happened?
The disruption began early Monday morning in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia, one of the world’s largest cloud clusters. Experts say the outage was linked to a malfunction in the Domain Name System (DNS) — the “phone book” of the internet that helps route web traffic.
When DNS resolution fails, entire applications can go dark, which is exactly what happened to major platforms like Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, Coinbase, and Facebook, along with airlines Delta and United.
Global impact
The ripple effects were felt across multiple sectors. In the UK, customers of Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax reported issues accessing online banking. In the US, government websites, ride-share apps, and even AI services like Perplexity also went down.
Some platforms were offline for more than six hours before slowly coming back online.
AWS responds
AWS confirmed that the issue has been resolved and that all systems have “returned to normal operations.”
“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the company said earlier in a statement. “We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information.”
The fallout
While outages are not uncommon, experts note that multi-site failures of this scale are becoming more frequent as global dependence on cloud infrastructure grows. One analyst estimated that financial losses from Monday’s disruption could total hundreds of billions of dollars.
AWS has promised to release a post-event summary in the coming weeks to explain the root cause and steps to prevent a repeat.
