Monday’s widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) AMZN -1.95% ▼ served as a stark wake-up call. For millions of users across the United States and beyond, the internet ground to a halt, rendering popular platforms like Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, and even critical services such as online banking inaccessible for hours. The disruption, which began late Sunday night and lingered into the afternoon, exposed the vulnerabilities in our increasingly centralized online infrastructure. As AWS, the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon, finally declared the issue resolved by late Monday, questions lingered about the reliability of the systems that power much of the modern web.
The outage, described by experts as one of the most significant in recent years, affected over 2,000 companies and services worldwide. From social media giants to gaming empires and financial institutions, the ripple effects were felt far and wide. “This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swath of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,” said Daniel Ramirez, director of product at Downdetector by Ookla, in an interview with CNET. “They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.”
According to AWS’s official status updates, the trouble began at 11:49 p.m. PT on Sunday, when the company first noticed increased error rates for services in its US-East-1 region—a massive data center hub in northern Virginia that supports operations across the US and Europe. By 12:26 a.m. PT, engineers had pinpointed the initial culprit: DNS resolution issues affecting regional endpoints for DynamoDB, AWS’s managed NoSQL database service.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s phonebook, translating user-friendly web addresses like “reddit.com” into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to connect. When DNS fails, it’s like losing the map to your destination—services are still there, but users can’t reach them. “It’s always DNS!” is a common refrain among tech professionals, as noted in reports from BBC News, highlighting how such seemingly mundane errors can cascade into widespread havoc.
As the night wore on, AWS resolved the DNS problem, but new challenges emerged. Network connectivity issues persisted, forcing the company to implement throttling—temporarily limiting the power and performance of certain operations—to stabilize the system. “Over time we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered,” AWS stated in its final update. By 3:01 p.m. PT on Monday, all services were back to normal, with full resolution announced at 3:53 p.m. PT.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Issues appeared largely contained as the East Coast started its workday, but reports surged dramatically after 8 a.m. PT when the West Coast came online. Downdetector, an outage-tracking platform owned by Ziff Davis, recorded a staggering 9.8 million user reports globally, with 2.7 million from the US alone. The UK followed with over 1.1 million, and significant numbers came from Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. At its peak around 10 a.m. PT, approximately 280 services were still experiencing lingering problems.
Among the hardest hit were consumer favorites: Reddit went dark until around 4:30 a.m. PT, Roblox and Fortnite left gamers frustrated, Snapchat users couldn’t send snaps, and even Amazon’s own Ring doorbells and e-commerce site faced intermittent failures. Financial services like Venmo and various online banking platforms were disrupted, as were the PlayStation Network, Verizon communications, and YouTube. In the UK, banks such as Lloyds and Halifax reported issues, while government services like HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) were affected, per BBC reports.
At the heart of the disruption lies AWS’s outsized role in the digital ecosystem. As the world’s leading cloud provider, AWS underpins roughly a third of the internet, offering scalable computing, storage, and database services that allow companies to outsource their infrastructure needs. This model saves businesses from maintaining expensive on-premise servers, but it also creates single points of failure. When AWS sneezes, the internet catches a cold.
Comparisons to past incidents abound. Similar to the 2021 Fastly content delivery network outage and the 2024 CrowdStrike cybersecurity glitch, Monday’s event underscored the fragility of our interconnected web. “The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets,” explained a The NY Budgets analysis. “When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to fall to its knees in a matter of minutes.”
The root cause, as later detailed by AWS at 8:43 a.m. PT, was traced to “an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” This subsystem’s failure amplified the initial DNS glitch, leading to degraded performance across services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides virtual servers in the cloud.
Experts like Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at Ookla, emphasized the need for better resilience strategies. “The lesson here is resilience,” Kehoe told The NY Budgets. “Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.”
Alternatives to AWS exist, but few match its scale. Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform are the primary competitors, with smaller players like IBM, Alibaba, and even European upstarts such as Stackit (launched by Lidl’s parent company) vying for market share. Yet, AWS remains dominant, prompting calls from some quarters—particularly in Europe and the UK—for greater investment in sovereign cloud infrastructure to reduce dependency on US-based giants. As one anonymous government source confided to BBC reporters, discussions about a UK equivalent to AWS have surfaced, only to be dismissed with, “We already have AWS, over there.” Incidents like this, however, reveal why such complacency might be shortsighted.
Amid the speculation, AWS and experts alike have ruled out a cyberattack as the cause. DNS issues can stem from malicious activities like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but there’s no evidence here. Instead, it appears to be a technical fault—possibly human error in configuration or a maintenance mishap at the northern Virginia facility, AWS’s oldest and largest data center.
That said, outages like this can create opportunities for bad actors. Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN, warned in a statement to CNET that hackers might exploit the chaos. “This is a cybersecurity issue as much as a technical one,” he said. “True online security isn’t only about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.” He advised users to be vigilant against phishing scams, such as fake emails urging password changes in the wake of the outage.
Cloudflare’s CEO, in a light-hearted jab reported by BBC, summed up the relief felt by competitors: “AWS had a bad day.” For Amazon, however, the incident adds to a string of high-profile stumbles, raising questions about accountability in an industry where downtime can cost businesses millions.
From a business perspective, the outage couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time for Amazon, with its third-quarter earnings report slated for October 30, 2025. Despite the disruption, Amazon’s stock (AMZN) showed resilience, closing Monday at $216.48—a 1.61% gain from the previous session. This outperformed the S&P 500’s 1.07% rise, the Dow’s 1.12% increase, and the Nasdaq’s 1.37% climb.
However, the broader picture is mixed. Over the past month, AMZN shares have dipped 7.97%, underperforming the Retail-Wholesale sector’s 5.23% loss but lagging behind the S&P 500’s 1.08% gain. Analysts remain optimistic, with Zacks Consensus Estimates projecting full-year earnings of $6.83 per share (a 23.51% year-over-year increase) and revenue of $708.73 billion (up 11.09%). For the upcoming quarter, EPS is forecasted at $1.60 (11.89% growth), with revenue at $177.96 billion (12.01% rise).
Recent analyst revisions have been positive, with the consensus EPS estimate rising 1.1% over the last 30 days, earning Amazon a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy). Valuation metrics show a Forward P/E of 31.2—above the Internet-Commerce industry average of 21.03—and a PEG ratio of 1.41, slightly higher than the sector’s 1.38. The industry itself ranks in the top 24% of Zacks’ 250+ sectors, suggesting strong fundamentals despite occasional hiccups.
Investors will be watching closely for any mention of the outage in Amazon’s earnings call, particularly regarding AWS’s growth trajectory. As the cloud division contributes significantly to Amazon’s profitability, ensuring uptime will be key to maintaining investor confidence.
Monday’s AWS outage wasn’t just a technical blip; it was a reminder of our collective vulnerability in a cloud-dependent world. As more businesses migrate to platforms like AWS for efficiency and cost savings, the potential for widespread disruption grows. While the internet has bounced back—for now—the event prompts a reevaluation of diversification strategies, regional redundancies, and even geopolitical dependencies in tech infrastructure.
