A widespread internet outage occurred on Monday, impacting the web hosting giant Amazon Web Services. This disruption affected a vast number of websites, online banking platforms, and various government services. Later that afternoon, Amazon provided an update on the situation, confirming the issue and stating that teams were actively working to restore all services. By 6:01 PM Eastern Time, the company announced that all AWS services had returned to normal operation.
In a public announcement, Amazon explained that the underlying cause of the outage was related to DNS resolution. DNS, or Domain Name System, is the technology responsible for converting web addresses into numerical IP addresses, allowing applications and websites to load properly. While some technical glitches can be fixed quickly, DNS-related problems often require more time to resolve completely.
AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined the issue was specifically tied to the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in its Northern Virginia data center region. The company stated that this core DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.
Even after the primary problem was fixed, Amazon noted that additional time was required to fully restore all services to their normal operational state. The company committed to completing this process as quickly as possible. The outage also impacted Amazon.com, its subsidiary companies, and AWS customer support operations.
By Monday evening Eastern Time, Amazon confirmed the outage had been fully mitigated and that most services were returning to normal. This resolution came after an hours-long period during which a significant portion of the internet was inaccessible. The disruption affected several major applications and services.
Notable services experiencing lengthy outages included Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, Perplexity, Venmo, and Zoom. Amazon’s own services were also impacted, including its Ring video surveillance products. The outage even extended to disrupting Eight Sleep’s cooling pods, which disturbed the sleep of its users.
Millions of companies and organizations worldwide rely on AWS to host their websites, applications, and other critical online systems. Amazon 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 happened in 2024. That incident was caused when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its anti-malware engine. This caused millions of computers to crash, resulting in significant airport delays and widespread system failures. Global systems took several days to return to normal following that event.
Prior to the 2024 outage, 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 hours. Amazon directed its customers to the AWS Health Dashboard for more detailed information on the recent outage and its resolution.