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A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) temporarily knocked several major platforms offline on Monday, exposing the global economy's deep dependence on a handful of cloud providers.
The disruption began early in the morning and affected a range of household names, including Amazon, Disney+, Reddit, Venmo, Coinbase, and Snapchat, along with gaming services such as Fortnite and Roblox. Reports on Downdetector also indicated access issues for government websites in the U.K. and major financial institutions including Lloyds Bank.
AWS attributed the issue to an "operational fault" impacting multiple services, stating engineers were "working on several paths in parallel to accelerate recovery." Within hours, Amazon said most systems had stabilized, though users could still experience throttled requests as the backlog cleared.
The outage temporarily disrupted travel systems, with some United and Delta Airlines customers unable to access booking or check-in portals. Design platform Canva reported "significantly increased error rates," while crypto exchange Coinbase acknowledged that some clients could not log in.
By 3:30 a.m. Pacific time, AWS announced the issue had been "fully mitigated," though minor delays persisted across some services.
Cybersecurity experts were quick to downplay speculation of a cyberattack. "This looks like a technical failure in one of Amazon's primary data centers," said Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN. "When cloud systems go down, the ripple effect is immediate because so much of the digital world depends on shared infrastructure."
Analysts noted parallels to the July 2024 CrowdStrike software failure that crippled Microsoft systems worldwide, grounding flights and disrupting hospitals. While the AWS incident was shorter and less severe, it reinforced similar lessons about centralization risks.
"This is a resilience problem, not a threat one," Jardin added. "Businesses must plan for technical faults as seriously as they do for cyberattacks by diversifying across multiple clouds."
Despite the outage, Amazon's stock showed minimal movement in premarket trading, suggesting limited investor concern. AWS, which contributes about 60% of Amazon's operating profit, remains the cornerstone of the company's long-term growth strategy.
