An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services disrupted vast portions of the internet, including websites, banks, and some government services. Amazon stated that the outage was fully mitigated and that most services were returning to normal after an hours-long period during which much of the internet could not load.
The internet giant attributed the outage to an issue with DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer applications and websites can load. The problem began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. east coast. While some technical glitches resolve quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to fix.
Several major applications 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, applications, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world and is said to control at least thirty percent of the total cloud market. Amazon did not provide a reason for what caused the outage.
Before this event, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024. That incident occurred when cybersecurity giant Crowdstrike published a flawed update to its anti-malware engine. This caused millions of computers around the world to crash, resulting 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, including FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network, to drop off the internet for several hours.