A major internet outage disrupted much of the web on Monday, knocking offline some of the world’s biggest websites, apps, and banking services.
Platforms including Snapchat, Zoom, Duolingo, Roblox, and Canva were affected, along with Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and National Rail in the UK. The disruption, which began early Monday afternoon Cyprus time, was traced to Amazon Web Services (AWS)- the cloud computing arm of Amazon- and its US-EAST-1 region in Virginia, one of the internet’s largest data-centre hubs.
Amazon confirmed that the problem stemmed from DNS resolution errors, preventing browsers and servers from correctly locating website data. By mid-afternoon the company said it was “seeing significant signs of recovery” but warned that some delays would continue as systems resynchronised.
“We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS services,” Amazon said. “We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution.”
Millions of users affected worldwide
Outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded more than four million global reports within hours of the internet outage- more than double a typical weekday’s total. Over 500 companies were affected, with more than 400,000 reports in the UK alone.
In addition to social media and gaming apps, many users faced issues accessing online banking and payment systems. The Rail Delivery Group confirmed that the National Rail website and app suffered “technical issues with our infrastructure provider,” leading to slow speeds and intermittent access.
Meanwhile, Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, said its services were “coming back online” after earlier disruptions that caused login errors and declined card payments.
Reddit and HMRC also hit
While many platforms began to recover, Reddit experienced a separate wave of problems, displaying “too many requests” errors and “degraded performance” messages. The UK’s tax authority HMRC also reported online service failures, adding that phonelines were “extremely busy” as customers struggled to make contact.
A spokesperson said the department was “working urgently” with Amazon to restore services.
Experts warn of dependence on cloud giants
Tech analysts say Monday’s internet outage exposes the global economy’s growing dependence on a handful of cloud providers. With Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud hosting vast portions of online infrastructure, even a brief malfunction can have worldwide repercussions.
Professor James Davenport of the University of Bath described it as “worrying” that UK financial institutions rely on US-based data centres. “Banks should be confining their usage to the UK or Europe rather than depending on systems running out of the US,” he said.
Amazon’s Virginia region is seen as a critical hub for global internet traffic, serving as a default hosting zone for countless companies. Because of its age, size and immense capacity, it is also more prone to instability and slow recovery times.
Recurring pattern of global outages
Incidents like today’s internet outage are becoming increasingly frequent as more businesses centralise their operations on shared cloud infrastructure.
- July 2024: A faulty CrowdStrike software update caused the infamous “blue screen of death” on 8.5 million computers worldwide.
- October 2021: A configuration error brought down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for nearly six hours.
- June 2021: A customer mistake at Fastly crashed Amazon, Reddit, Shopify and Spotify for about an hour.
- December 2020: A Google storage failure simultaneously took down Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive.
Experts warn that unless companies diversify their cloud strategies, these cascading failures will continue. “When one major provider falters, the effects are immediate and global,” one analyst said.
Amazon: issue fixed but recovery ongoing
Amazon says it has resolved the root cause of the internet outage and most systems are operational again, though some delays remain as queued data requests are processed.
As engineers work to restore full capacity, users worldwide are gradually regaining access to their favourite services- a reminder of just how interconnected, and fragile, the modern internet has become.
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