Amazon Web Services Nears Full Recovery After Massive Cloud Outage Disrupts Global Internet

A major global internet disruption that impacted thousands of websites and services — from Snapchat and Reddit to banking apps and gaming platforms — is now largely under control, according to Amazon.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said Monday evening that it had “fully mitigated” the core issue that crippled its US-EAST-1 data center in northern Virginia, one of its most heavily used cloud infrastructure hubs. The root of the problem, Amazon confirmed, was tied to its Domain Name System (DNS) and internal network load balancing, which prevented applications from accessing critical backend services.

Apps, Banks, Airlines Paralyzed for Hours

The outage wreaked havoc across industries and borders, disrupting everything from airline bookings and food deliveries to video conferencing and digital payments. Millions of users across cities like London, Tokyo, and New York were locked out of tools they rely on daily, such as Zoom, Reddit, Venmo, Lyft, and Coinbase.

Gaming platforms like Fortnite and Clash of Clans also experienced blackouts, while Uber competitor Lyft faced delays in ride-matching. Even Amazon’s own services — Prime Video, Alexa, and its retail platform — saw issues throughout the day.

Several UK-based institutions, including Lloyds Bank, HMRC, and telecom giants like BT and Vodafone, were knocked offline, underscoring the scale and severity of the outage.

Recurring Vulnerabilities in US-EAST-1

This marks at least the third major AWS disruption traced back to the US-EAST-1 region in five years. The region is AWS’s oldest and most widely used hub, often the default setting for cloud services. While Amazon has not explained why this data center cluster remains a repeat vulnerability, Monday’s failure has reignited calls for broader cloud resilience strategies.

Lambda, EC2, and DynamoDB — three key AWS services — were all affected. The disruption originated from an internal subsystem monitoring EC2’s load balancers and cascaded into a DNS failure that disabled apps’ ability to communicate properly with AWS’s backend.

While AWS has rolled out recovery protocols, internal notes reviewed by Reuters indicated that “tons of broken internal services” were still undergoing repairs throughout the afternoon.

Calls for More Fault-Tolerant Infrastructure

Experts say the incident highlights a dangerous overreliance on a handful of global cloud providers. Ken Birman, a Cornell computer science professor, warned that developers often skip crucial backup and failover steps in favor of speed or cost savings.

“Those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later,” Birman told Reuters.

Ryan Griffin of McGill and Partners emphasized the financial toll of cloud outages: “For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue.”

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity analyst at ESET, added, “This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures.”

Market Shrugs Off Chaos

Despite the massive disruption, Wall Street showed little concern. Amazon stock rose 1.6% to $216.48 on the day.

As of late Monday, most affected services were back online, but the incident has revived conversations about diversification, decentralization, and cloud accountability — especially for companies that bet everything on a single provider.

With over 4 million user reports logged through Downdetector, Monday’s outage was the largest since last year’s CrowdStrike bug, and it served as a stark reminder of how the digital world remains critically dependent on AWS and its aging Virginia data center.