A massive internet outage sent shockwaves across the globe on Monday morning after Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the cloud network powering nearly half of the web — suddenly went down.
The disruption crippled hundreds of major websites and apps, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, and Duolingo, leaving millions of users locked out of their accounts or unable to connect. Even Amazon’s own services — Alexa, Ring, and Prime Video — were affected.
Reports of the outage began flooding in shortly after 8 a.m. (BST), with over 6,000 users in the U.S. and 1,600 in the U.K. logging complaints on DownDetector, a website that tracks service interruptions.
The problem has been traced to Amazon’s data centre hub in North Virginia, one of the most critical internet nodes in the world.
Amazon has acknowledged the problem on its AWS Health Dashboard, describing it as an “operational issue” affecting multiple services.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause,” the company said.
While speculation spread rapidly online — with some fearing a cyberattack — cybersecurity expert Jake Moore from ESET believes it’s likely an internal glitch.
“AWS controls around 30% of the global cloud market,” Moore said. “When a system that big fails, it’s felt worldwide. This looks like an internal error that caused a cascading failure — one slowdown triggered another across the network.”
The widespread disruption once again exposes the world’s growing dependence on a handful of tech giants to keep digital life running smoothly — and how a single technical failure can ripple across continents in seconds.
