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A significant internet outage has brought down many of the world’s most popular applications and websites for several hours. Users across the globe reported issues with platforms like Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, and Canva, alongside other major services and even banking institutions.
The widespread disruption began around 8 AM UK time (midnight Pacific) and persisted throughout the day, leaving millions unable to access their favorite digital services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identified as Outage Cause
The root cause of this massive outage appears to be an issue within Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides critical infrastructure that underpins a vast portion of the modern internet, offering cloud computing and server services that countless companies rely on to host their applications and websites.
As the leading provider of cloud services globally, with revenues of $108 billion last year, any hiccup at AWS can quickly cascade, affecting websites and apps that may not have an obvious direct connection to Amazon. This incident highlights the immense reliance of the digital world on a few core infrastructure providers.
Affected Services and Ongoing Recovery
The impact was broad, with tracking website Down Detector registering huge spikes in user complaints. Beyond the major social and gaming platforms, services like Reddit, Wordle, and even the UK’s tax authority, HMRC, experienced problems.
Initial reports from Amazon Web Services confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues” within its US-EAST-1 Region. The underlying problem was later identified as a Domain Name System (DNS) issue—the ‘phone book’ of the internet that helps computers find each other.
While AWS announced that the DNS issue has been “fully mitigated,” and most service operations are recovering, some disruptions, such as slow responses or backlogs of requests, were expected to continue for the rest of the day as systems gradually came back online.
The Centralization of the Internet: A Recurring Concern
This latest outage has reignited discussions about the increasing centralization of the internet. Experts note that despite its original design as a resilient, decentralized network, much of today’s web infrastructure relies heavily on a very small number of companies, with AWS being paramount.
Computer networking expert Graeme Bragg from the University of Southampton highlighted that the issue affected numerous services hosted in different regions because Amazon hosts much of its management infrastructure in the affected region. “This is a significant outage because of how many companies rely on Amazon and the global scale of the impact,” Bragg stated.
Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at the University of Cambridge, also pointed out a challenging irony: the very communication channels used by tech professionals to discuss and resolve such outages (like Slack or Signal) can also be disrupted, further complicating response efforts.
Rimesh Patel, a cybersecurity specialist, emphasized the “stark reality” that disruptions at a single critical vendor can trigger global instability, underscoring the vital need for robust supply chain and infrastructure resiliency in every organization’s strategy.
As the internet slowly returns to full functionality, this incident serves as a powerful reminder of the delicate foundations upon which our increasingly digital world rests.