An outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday affected over 28 services, knocking out popular apps, delaying flights, and halting business operations for millions. The disruption, rooted in a DNS resolution issue at AWS's oldest US data center, was resolved by afternoon but highlighted the internet's fragility. Educational platforms like Canvas also failed, impacting college students across the US.
The outage began Monday morning, originating at Amazon's oldest and largest US data center, which serves as the default region for many AWS services. Engineers identified increased error rates and latency in cloud database technology, tracing the problem to a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution failure. This cascade effect shut down more than two dozen AWS services, including hosting for apps like Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit, as well as Amazon's own e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video. Banks and financial services went offline, flights were delayed, and massive games like Fortnite became inaccessible, forcing millions of businesses to halt operations, from employee logins to payment processing.
At its peak, Down Detector recorded over 8 million user reports globally. The incident echoed previous AWS outages in 2020 and 2021 at the same site, despite Amazon's claims that those issues had been fully mitigated. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told CNN, “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed—from airlines to factories.”
The disruption extended to education, with online learning platform Canvas—used by half of US college students—going dark. Student Abby Fagerlin reported being unable to log in Monday morning to access assignments or contact professors. Cornell University computer science professor Ken Birman told Reuters that “software developers need to build better fault tolerance,” adding, “When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn’t really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later.”
Experts suggest the event may push customers toward multi-cloud strategies, distributing workloads across providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, particularly among risk-averse financial firms. Amazon confirmed the outage's resolution Monday afternoon, but analysts estimate billions in damages, with potential backlash threatening its market position as the world's largest cloud provider.