For a few tense hours early Monday morning, much of the internet stumbled. From payment apps to streaming platforms to government websites, an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) temporarily silenced corners of the digital world, offering another reminder of how deeply our online lives depend on a handful of tech giants.
The disruption began around 3 a.m. Eastern Time, hitting a wide range of popular services, including Venmo, Hulu, Snapchat, the chat app Signal, and parts of the British government’s online infrastructure. Even Amazon’s own website wasn’t immune. By 5:27 a.m., the company said most affected systems were back online, though it was still “working through a backlog of queued requests.”
While the disruption lasted just over two hours, its reach was enormous. Banks, gaming platforms, and entertainment services all reported interruptions. Users struggled to access various services, including WhatsApp, Coinbase, The New York Times’ puzzle games, Ring doorbells, and McDonald’s ordering systems. American Airlines and Delta Airlines were also affected.
“United [Airlines] implemented back-up systems to end the technology disruption and our teams are working to get our customers on their way,” the company said in a statement.
Amazon initially attributed the failure to an “operational issue” centered in its Northern Virginia region, known internally as “us-east-1,” one of the company’s largest data centers.
There was no immediate indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. But the precise cause remained unclear as the company worked to restore full functionality.
Experts said the incident highlights how much of the internet’s infrastructure rests on the shoulders of just a few major cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, among them. When one stumbles, millions of users and entire industries can be caught in the digital crossfire.
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“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, told The Associated Press.
Harry Halpin, chief executive of NymVPN, a virtual private network company, told The New York Times that this was the consequence of an unstable and monopolized system.
“If your entire nation’s infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that’s an exceedingly dangerous situation.”
Dr. Halpin, who previously worked as a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he awoke to messages from Ukrainian soldiers, who use his company’s VPN services, asking why communications had failed. “Everyone takes it for normal,” he said. “But it’s not normal.”
He speculated that a technical fault in one of Amazon’s main data centers may have been to blame, though he added that cloud platforms’ operations are inherently opaque, making it impossible to confirm without Amazon’s disclosure.
The outage reignited debate about the concentration of power within the cloud computing industry. Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for Article 19, a free speech advocacy group, warned that the failure underscored the risks of over-centralization.
“When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
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Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University in England, echoed the concern, noting that “for everyday operations, cloud computing works.” But he added that even one small error, like a faulty update, can take down the entire system.
Last year, a daylong global outage caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crippled systems worldwide, another sign of the web’s fragility when critical infrastructure falters.
For many organizations, outsourcing data storage and computing to cloud providers like Amazon offers flexibility, cost savings, and scalability. AWS powers thousands of companies across industries, providing the backbone for video streaming, data analysis, and online transactions. In the first half of this year, the division accounted for nearly 20 percent of Amazon’s total sales but generated about 60 percent of its operating profit.
Still, despite the scope of the disruption, investors barely flinched. Amazon’s stock price held steady in premarket trading, perhaps a sign that, in the modern internet economy, occasional outages are simply accepted as the price of convenience.
Some political leaders are growing less comfortable with that trade-off. Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, called the incident “a stark reminder that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but a matter of security and resilience.”
She and others are urging European nations to host critical infrastructure on home soil under E.U. jurisdiction, reducing dependence on U.S.-based corporations.
Two decades ago, most companies operated their own data centers. But as Mehdi Daoudi, founder of the internet monitoring firm Catchpoint, noted, today, most rely on Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Chinese companies for cloud services. Rising costs have recently prompted some organizations to reconsider that model and bring their infrastructure back in-house.
Whether Monday’s outage will accelerate that trend remains to be seen. For now, it stands as another wake-up call in a string of digital disruptions, showcasing the precarious position of many of our information systems.
“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve),” and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess told The Associated Press.
“This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue, something’s gone wrong, and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
