Amazon Web Services (AWS), the foundation of most of the internet, experienced a significant outage on Monday due to a flawed update that prevented millions worldwide from accessing innumerable websites and apps.
This issue demonstrated how reliant the world has become on a small number of cloud providers by shutting down vital web services for hours. It wasn’t just a minor annoyance; many users experienced major gaming and banking systems being down, as well as websites like Zoom, Venmo, and WhatsApp.
Cloud failure shakes Internet reliability
The root of the chaos was an issue in AWS’s East Coast region, the largest part of the internet’s cloud infrastructure.
According to Amazon, the mechanism that converts human-friendly site URLs into computer-friendly IP addresses could not interface correctly with AWS’s enormous database systems, which is where the issue started.
This caused repeated errors across thousands of services, making the internet appear broken for users visiting popular sites or using mobile apps.
Over 11 million internet problems were reported during this outage, making it the largest AWS disruption in 2025.
“Amazon Web Services went down Monday morning, crippling thousands of services from some of the biggest companies on earth,” reported Axios, emphasising the fragility behind the seemingly seamless digital world. The glitch impacted critical sectors, including banking, social media, airline booking, and e-commerce.
Beyond simple technical failure, this episode highlights a growing “centralisation risk,” notes Corey Quinn, a cloud economist. Businesses have shifted from managing their data centres to outsourcing to giant cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft because it’s cheaper and more efficient. But this concentration means that a single error in one provider can ripple through the entire web, knocking out services worldwide.
Millions were stuck Monday afternoon, unable to use their preferred applications to get coffee or access necessary web services. Although Amazon subsequently resolved the issue, several websites continued to experience instability hours later, serving as a clear reminder of the modern internet’s significant reliance on a small number of cloud operators.