A major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday, October 20, caused widespread disruption across the internet, taking down several popular websites, apps and online tools used by millions worldwide.
The hours-long disruption mainly affected AWS’s US-EAST-1 data centre in northern Virginia. This is its oldest and largest facility. The issue was traced to a technical fault in AWS’s network health monitoring system and a malfunction in the Domain Name System (DNS), which helps connect apps and websites to their correct servers.
As a result, many major services including Snapchat, WhatsApp, Reddit, Zoom, Venmo, Coinbase, Robinhood, Signal, and Duolingo were temporarily unavailable. Amazon’s own platforms, such as its shopping website, Prime Video, Alexa smart devices, and Ring doorbells were also affected.
Several financial and media organisations, including Lloyds Bank, the Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, The New York Times and the Associated Press, reported interruptions. The outage also hit gaming platforms like Fortnite and Roblox. Even FC Barcelona confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that its website and app had been restored after the global cloud disruption.
AWS engineers immediately began working to restore services, throttling operations to stabilise the system. Amazon said the DNS issue had been “fully mitigated,” though clearing the data backlog took several more hours. “All AWS services returned to normal operations,” the company confirmed later in the day.
Reuters reported that the problem originated within Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2) internal network, which distributes traffic across servers. “The root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers,” AWS said in a statement.
Experts said the incident once again exposed how dependent the world has become on a few large cloud providers. Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, told Al Jazeera that the outage “highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures.”
This was at least the third time in five years that AWS’s Virginia site caused a major internet outage. Despite the large-scale disruption, Amazon’s shares rose 1.6 percent on Wall Street as analysts said the company would likely weather the impact.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, millions of users across the globe reported issues, marking one of the biggest internet breakdowns in recent years.
