Major AWS Outage Disrupts Global Internet Services, Affecting Banks, Apps, and Government Systems

A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, caused massive disruptions across the internet on Monday taking down websites, banking systems, and some government services for several hours.

Amazon confirmed the incident early Monday morning, saying the issue had been “fully mitigated” and that most services were gradually returning to normal after an hours-long disruption that began around 3 a.m. Eastern Time.

According to the company, the outage was linked to Domain Name System (DNS) errors the mechanism that converts web addresses into IP addresses to allow websites and applications to load. DNS-related issues are notoriously tricky to fix, sometimes taking longer to stabilize even after core services recover.

During the outage, several major platforms including Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom experienced prolonged downtime. Amazon’s own products, such as its Ring video surveillance systems, were also affected.

The impact was widespread due to AWS’s dominance in global cloud infrastructure. Millions of companies and institutions depend on its servers for web hosting, app functionality, and data management. AWS currently holds an estimated 30% share of the global cloud market, making disruptions like this highly consequential.

While Amazon confirmed that the issue has been resolved, it did not disclose the precise cause of the DNS malfunction.

This latest event adds to a string of major internet disruptions in recent years. In 2024, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a global IT crisis after releasing a faulty update to its anti-malware engine, which led to widespread system crashes and airport shutdowns worldwide. Earlier, in 2021, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai brought down some of the world’s most visited websites, including FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network.

As of Monday afternoon, most AWS-dependent services appeared to be stabilizing, but technical experts warn that intermittent issues may persist until DNS propagation completes globally.