An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services, or AWS, impacted vast portions of the internet. This disruption included numerous websites, banking institutions, and some government services. On Monday afternoon, the company provided an update on the cause of the issue and noted it was still not yet fully resolved.
In an announcement, Amazon shared that the underlying issue was related to DNS resolution. DNS, or domain name system, is the internet protocol that helps translate domain names into numeric IP addresses. AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined the issue was related to DNS resolution for the DynamoDB API endpoints in its Northern Virginia region. The company stated the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated later that night.
Although the core technical problem was fixed, Amazon noted it was still working to fully restore all services as quickly as possible. The issue also impacted Amazon’s own website, its subsidiaries, and AWS customer support operations. Amazon advised customers to check the AWS Health Dashboard for the latest information.
The internet giant confirmed the outage had been fully mitigated and that most services were returning to normal after an hours-long stretch during which much of the internet could not load. The outage began in the early morning hours on the U.S. East Coast and was attributed to DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses. While some technical glitches resolve quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to fix.
Several major apps and services experienced lengthy outages. These included platforms like Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom. 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, applications, and other critical online systems. The company operates data centers all over the world and is estimated to hold at least thirty percent of the total cloud market. Amazon did not provide a reason for what initially caused the outage.
Before this event, the most recent global internet outage occurred in 2024. That incident was caused when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike published a buggy update to its anti-malware engine. This caused millions of computers worldwide to crash, resulting in significant airport delays and mass outages. Systems globally took several days to return to normal.
Prior to the CrowdStrike incident, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites, including FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network, to drop off the internet for several hours.