Written by Lexx Thornton
On Monday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) finally confirmed it had resolved a massive cloud hosting outage that had caused widespread disruption for millions of internet users globally.Â
The event, which Reuters called “global turmoil,” was reportedly the worst outage since last year’s CrowdStrike incident. As the world’s largest cloud provider, AWS is, as ZDNet put it, the “backbone of much of the Internet.” The disruption affected more than 28 AWS services, leading to an estimated loss of billions in damages, according to one analyst’s estimate for CNN.Â
The impact was immediate and extensive:Â
- Popular services like Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went offline.Â
- Flights were delayed.Â
- Banks and financial services ceased operations.Â
- Massive games, including Fortnite, became inaccessible.Â
- Even some of Amazon’s own services, such as its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video, were hit.Â
Millions of businesses found themselves simply unable to operate, with employees locked out of systems and companies unable to process payments.Â
The incident was a stark reminder of the internet’s fragility. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring firm, told CNN the financial toll would “easily reach into the hundreds of billions” due to lost productivity and halted business operations across industries, from airlines to factories.Â
According to Reuters, the source of Amazon’s problems was a U.S. site that is its “oldest and largest for web services” and often serves as the “default region for many AWS services.” This same site had experienced two prior outages in 2020 and 2021. Despite Amazon previously stating those issues had been “fully mitigated,” the recent event showed that the fixes had not ensured long-term stability into 2025.Â
