Amazon Cloud Outage Disrupts Global Internet Services for Hours

A major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the tech giant’s crucial cloud network — disrupted large parts of the internet on Monday, bringing down streaming platforms, messaging services, banking systems and even government websites for several hours. The incident underscored the global dependence on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure for day-to-day digital life.

The outage caused widespread disruption across popular services, including Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Fortnite, Airbnb, Snapchat, Duolingo, and Perplexity AI.

In Europe, mobile networks and messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp experienced significant connection problems, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Users also reported difficulty accessing Amazon’s own e-commerce platform, while several banks — including Lloyds Bank — confirmed interruptions in online services, attributing the issue directly to AWS.

Amazon stated via its AWS status page that affected systems had returned to “pre-event levels” after several hours, though engineers estimated that it would take approximately two additional hours to clear the data backlog caused by the outage.

AWS engineers confirmed that the disruption was triggered by a “load balancer health” malfunction linked to the company’s internal monitoring subsystem. The failure resulted in elevated error rates across multiple services, creating a massive backlog of unprocessed data requests.

Amazon’s official update explained: “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

Though service restoration began within hours, Amazon continued to perform system recovery and backlog management more than 10 hours after the initial disruption.

Outage tracking site Downdetector recorded two enormous spikes in global disruption reports — one early in the day and another approximately nine hours later — culminating in over 11 million total user reports.

The effects extended far beyond entertainment and social media platforms. The British government’s websites were also affected, demonstrating the fragility of critical digital infrastructure dependent on a handful of cloud service providers.

“Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organisations and, in some cases, governments globally,”
— Jacob Bourne, Senior Analyst, eMarketer

Michael Hewson, a financial analyst, noted the economic risks of centralised cloud reliance: “This outage shows how dependent we are on companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet. On an economic level, it’s almost akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket.”

AWS remains the undisputed leader in the global cloud computing market, commanding nearly one-third of total infrastructure share, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Millions of businesses, government agencies, and consumers rely on these networks to operate essential services.

As reliance on these systems deepens, analysts warn that such outages could have increasingly severe economic and security consequences.

This incident follows a similar global outage in July 2024, when a faulty software update from U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread system failures affecting airports, hospitals, and major corporations. According to Microsoft, 8.5 million devices were hit by that event, forcing many users to face the dreaded “blue screen of death.”

The AWS disruption serves as a fresh reminder that even the world’s most advanced digital infrastructure remains vulnerable — and that global connectivity, as powerful as it is, continues to rest on a fragile foundation.