An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services, or AWS, has disrupted vast portions of the internet. This incident impacted websites, banks, and various government services. On Monday afternoon, the company provided an update on the cause of the problem and noted it was still not yet fully resolved.
In an announcement, the company explained that the underlying issue was related to DNS resolution. DNS, which stands for domain name system, is the technology that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that applications and websites can load properly.
AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined the issue was tied to the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in its Northern Virginia region. The company stated that the core DNS problem was fully mitigated later that night.
Although the primary issue has been fixed, Amazon noted it was still working to completely restore all services as quickly as possible. The outage also affected Amazon’s own website, its subsidiaries, and its customer support operations. Customers were advised to check the AWS Health Dashboard for the most current information.
Amazon said on Monday morning that the outage had been fully mitigated and that most services were returning to normal. This followed a period of several hours during which a significant part of the internet failed to load. The outage began in the early morning hours on the U.S. East Coast.
Several major applications experienced lengthy outages. These included platforms such as Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, Perplexity, and Zoom. Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance products, were also affected. The disruption even extended to Eight Sleep’s cooling pods, disturbing the sleep of some users.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, applications, and other critical online systems. The company operates data centers across the globe and is estimated to control at least thirty percent of the total cloud market.
Before this event, the most recent major global internet outage occurred in 2024. That incident was caused when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its anti-malware engine. This caused millions of computers worldwide to crash, leading to significant airport delays and widespread system failures. It took several days for systems globally to return to normal.
Prior to the CrowdStrike incident, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused several of the world’s largest websites, including FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network, to go offline for multiple hours.