A widespread disruption impacting Amazon Web Services (AWS), a major provider of web hosting, resulted in the unavailability of numerous websites, banking platforms, and certain governmental online services.
Amazon announced on Monday morning that the disruption had been “fully mitigated” and that the majority of services were returning to their normal operational status after lasting for several hours, during which a significant portion of the internet was inaccessible.
The internet giant attributed the disruption, which commenced at approximately 3 a.m. U.S. east coast time, to DNS. DNS is a system that translates web addresses into IP addresses, enabling the loading of customer applications and websites.
While certain technical issues can be resolved swiftly, DNS-related problems may occasionally require extended resolution times.
Several prominent applications experienced service interruptions. Lengthy outages were reported for Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom, as well as for Amazon’s proprietary services, including its Ring video surveillance offerings.
Millions of enterprises and organizations depend on AWS for hosting their websites, applications, and other essential online systems. The company maintains data centers globally and is estimated to possess at least 30% of the overall cloud market share.
Amazon did not disclose the underlying cause of the disruption.
Previously, a major global internet disruption occurred in 2024, when cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike released a faulty update to its anti-malware engine. This update triggered widespread computer crashes worldwide, leading to airport disruptions and widespread outages. It took several days for global systems to return to normal.
Before that, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites to become unavailable for several hours. Affected websites included FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network.
