Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a major outage today, causing widespread disruption across several popular websites, apps, and online services worldwide. The outage, which began around 12:11 AM PDT (12:41 PM IST) in the US-EAST-1 (N. Virginia) region, lasted for nearly 11 hours before Amazon began reporting early signs of recovery.
Widespread Impact Across the Internet
The outage affected multiple AWS services including EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, and SQS, leading to cascading failures across numerous online platforms.
Among the most heavily impacted services were:
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Snapchat – users reported login failures and message delays
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Fortnite – players faced connectivity and matchmaking issues
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Duolingo – the learning app went offline for several hours
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Major banks and fintech platforms – transaction delays and app downtime were reported
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Corporate websites and SaaS providers – several business tools hosted on AWS went offline temporarily
According to Downdetector, more than 11 million outage reports were logged globally, including three million from the United States alone. Over 395 companies reported ongoing technical issues, and 2,500 services saw a surge in user complaints related to AWS disruptions.
Root Cause: Internal Network Load Balancer Failure
AWS engineers confirmed that the issue originated from an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of network load balancers within the EC2 infrastructure. The malfunction caused network connectivity failures across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region — one of Amazon’s largest and most critical data hubs.
Amazon stated:
“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances are progressing, and the internal subsystems of EC2 are now showing early signs of recovering in a few Availability Zones. We are applying mitigations to the remaining zones to restore normal operations.”
Global Fallout and Financial Impact
The outage not only affected individual apps but also had a massive economic impact.
According to Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet monitoring firm Catchpoint, the financial toll could reach hundreds of billions of dollars due to loss of productivity and downtime across businesses.
“This incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet,” Daoudi said. “Millions of workers and businesses were disrupted — from airlines to factories.”
Services Affected (Major Highlights)
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AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – New instance launches failed for hours
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AWS Lambda – Function invocation errors and long processing delays
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DynamoDB – API requests failed or timed out
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Amazon Connect – Call handling interruptions
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S3 and CloudTrail – Temporary delays in event processing
Recovery Timeline
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12:11 AM PDT: AWS detected increased error rates in the US-EAST-1 region.
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2:01 AM PDT: Engineers identified a DNS resolution issue linked to DynamoDB.
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3:35 AM PDT: AWS reported that the underlying DNS problem had been mitigated, though EC2 and Lambda were still unstable.
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6:42 AM PDT: Continued EC2 launch errors and throttling in some availability zones.
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11:22 AM PDT: AWS confirmed major improvements, with services like Lambda and EC2 showing signs of recovery.
As of 11:30 AM PDT (11:00 PM IST), Amazon reported significant recovery across most services, although some users may still experience slow performance or intermittent connectivity.
Lessons from the Outage
Today’s incident once again underscores the global dependence on AWS, which powers a significant portion of the world’s internet infrastructure — including cloud hosting, business applications, and entertainment platforms.
Experts warn that while AWS remains highly resilient, such large-scale outages demonstrate the need for multi-cloud redundancy and stronger failover mechanisms to prevent single-region failures from affecting global users.
