Amazon Outage ‘Resolved’ After Major Disruption Hits Snapchat, Banks, and More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed late Monday that it had resolved a massive outage that disrupted some of the world’s largest websites and apps, including Snapchat, Reddit, Lloyds Bank, and Halifax.
The outage, which began around 07:00 BST, impacted over 1,000 services globally. Platform outage monitor Downdetector reported more than 11 million user complaints during the disruption, highlighting the internet’s reliance on a handful of cloud providers.
Experts warn that this incident underscores the risks of concentrated cloud infrastructure. Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said, “So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur even in the largest of providers. Small human errors can have widespread, significant impact.”
Amazon attributed the outage to issues with DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1, a core service that helps websites translate domain names into machine-readable IP addresses. While the company resolved the issue by 23:00 BST, cascading failures affected services as they tried to recover.
Tech experts emphasize shared responsibility. Professor Ken Birman of Cornell University said app developers must invest in backup and protection systems for mission-critical applications. Past incidents, like the CrowdStrike outage affecting Delta Airlines, illustrate the costly consequences of cloud dependency.
The outage also reignites debates over the dominance of a few major cloud providers. Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, said, “Once a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it… We need structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kinds of shocks.”
As AWS services return to normal, the incident serves as a stark reminder of both the power and vulnerabilities of cloud computing in a digital-first world.
