Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday, taking down numerous big-name websites.
Many sites were back online, although Downdetector showed another spike in user reports around noon ET of outages at Amazon, AWS and Alexa.
Around 11 a.m. ET, AWS said it was working to identify the “root cause” for the network connectivity issues impacting some of its services.
“We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network,” the company wrote, referring to its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity. “We continue to investigate and identify migrations.”
The outage was first reported at 3:11 a.m. ET in AWS’ main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. A notice on AWS’ status page said it was experiencing DNS problems with DynamoDB, its database service that underpins many other AWS applications.
DNS, or Domain Name System, translates website names to IP addresses so browsers and other applications can load.
AWS cited an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” in an update at 5:01 a.m. ET. More than 70 of its own services were affected.
Shortly afterward, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery.”
AWS said in an update at 6:35 a.m. ET that the DNS issue had been “fully mitigated” and that AWS service operations were “succeeding normally.”
AWS is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for around a third of the market, ahead of Microsoft and Google, according to Synergy Research Group. Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS for cloud computing services, such as servers and storage.
Major companies hit
Downdetector showed user reports indicating problems at sites including Disney+, Lyft, the McDonald’s app, The New York Times, Reddit, Ring doorbells, Robinhood, Snapchat, United Airlines and Venmo.
British government websites Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs were also experiencing issues, per Downdetector.
A government spokesperson told CNBC: “We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Lloyds Banking Group confirmed that some of its services were affected and asked customers “to bear with us” while it worked to restore them. Some 20 minutes later, it added that services were coming back online.
The outage also brought down critical tools inside Amazon. Warehouse and delivery employees, along with drivers for Amazon’s Flex service, reported on Reddit that internal systems were offline at many sites. Some warehouse workers were instructed to stand by in break rooms and loading areas during their shift, while they couldn’t load Amazon’s Anytime Pay app, which lets employees access a portion of their paycheck immediately.
Seller Central, the hub used by Amazon’s third-party sellers to manage their businesses, was also knocked offline by the outage.
Reddit, too, is “working on scaling Reddit back to 100 percent as we speak,” a spokesperson told CNBC.
Some United and Delta Air Lines customers reported on social media that they couldn’t find their reservations online, check in or drop bags.
Canvas, an online teaching platform used to host course information and submit assignments, said it was also hit by the “ongoing AWS incident.”
Other social media users cited disruption across cloud-based games, including Roblox and Fortnite, while crypto exchange Coinbase said many users were unable to access the service due to the outage.
Graphic design tool Canva said it was “experiencing significantly increased error rates which are impacting functionality on Canva. There is a major issue with our underlying cloud provider.”
Generative artificial intelligence search tool Perplexity was also affected. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X.
Centralized software
It’s not the first time in recent history that major companies have been affected by a technical issue. In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike revealed the fragility of global technology infrastructure when it caused Microsoft Windows systems to go dark, creating millions of dollars worth of chaos and grounding thousands of flights in the process. It also affected hospitals and banks.
AWS has also experienced other outages in recent years. A disruption in 2023 knocked many websites offline for several hours, while a more severe outage in 2021 affected websites and services across the globe, including some of Amazon’s own delivery operations, which were briefly brought to a standstill.
“There’s no sign that this AWS outage was caused by a cyberattack – it looks like a technical fault affecting one of Amazon’s main data centres,” Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity company NymVPN, said in a statement. “These issues can happen when systems become overloaded or a key part of the network goes down, and because so many websites and apps rely on AWS, the impact spreads quickly.”
An Amazon spokesperson pointed to AWS’ service health dashboard when reached for comment.
Indeed, “DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know,” Mike Chapple, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said in a statement. However, it “is one of the record-keepers of the modern Internet.”
“We’ll learn more in the hours and days ahead but early reports indicate that this wasn’t actually a problem with the database itself. The data appears to be safe. Instead, something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data,” he added.
“This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.”
— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.