A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage reminded the world how fragile the modern internet really is. On Monday morning, several of the most-used apps and websites — including Venmo, Snapchat, Canva, Fortnite, and even Alexa — went offline, leaving millions of users disconnected.
The issue originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, one of Amazon’s most critical data center hubs in Northern Virginia. The disruption rippled across the web, showing how much of the internet depends on a handful of cloud giants.
The Outage That Shook the Internet
At around 3:11 AM ET, Amazon engineers reported increased error rates and latency across multiple AWS services. By 5:01 AM, they identified the culprit — a DNS resolution failure linked to the DynamoDB API, one of AWS’s most important database systems.
Although customer data was never lost, the outage made it temporarily unreachable. As Mike Chapple, professor of IT at the University of Notre Dame, put it:
“It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
By 6:35 AM, AWS announced it had mitigated the DNS issue and most services were back online. However, secondary issues began emerging. EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, continued struggling with new instance launches. By 10:14 AM, Amazon was still reporting significant API errors and connectivity problems in the affected region.
The Domino Effect of Centralized Cloud
Because so many companies host in US-EAST-1, the outage had a domino effect. Reports surged on Down Detector as users experienced slowdowns or complete service failures.
Impacted services included Disney+, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Roblox, banks, airlines, and even The New York Times, leading to delays and errors across millions of devices worldwide.
For hours, the internet seemed broken — not because of hackers, but because a single regional cloud failure brought the web to its knees.
What This Means for the Cloud Industry
AWS currently holds about 30% of the global cloud market, powering everything from startups to government infrastructure. Its appeal lies in scalability — the ability to automatically adjust computing power based on demand — and its vast network of global data centers.
But as this outage showed, centralized dependency has a dark side. When one region falters, the impact cascades across thousands of services that rely on it. Even redundancy strategies, like multiple availability zones, can fail if the problem affects shared infrastructure such as DNS or APIs.
Experts say this should push companies to rethink multi-cloud strategies — using a mix of providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS to reduce single points of failure.
The Bigger Picture
Incidents like this highlight a growing vulnerability: the internet’s backbone rests on the reliability of a few massive players. The outage served as a wake-up call that even the most advanced cloud architecture isn’t immune to failure.
For most users, everything was back by late morning, but the lesson lingers — the more centralized the internet becomes, the more fragile it gets.