An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services, or AWS, took out vast portions of the web. This included websites, banks, and some government services. Amazon stated that the outage was fully mitigated and that most services are returning to normal after an hours-long stretch during which much of the internet could not load.
The internet giant blamed the outage on DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load. The issue began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. east coast. While some glitches can resolve quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve.
Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom faced lengthy outages. Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance products, were also affected.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least thirty percent of the total cloud market. Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage.
Before this, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024. Cybersecurity giant Crowdstrike published a buggy update to its anti-malware engine, causing millions of computers around the world to crash. This resulted in airport delays and mass outages. Systems globally took several days to return to normal.
Prior to that, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites to drop off the internet for several hours. Affected services included FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network.