Major AWS Outage Disrupts Global Websites Including Snapchat, Reddit, and Major Banks

A widespread outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused major disruptions on Monday, temporarily knocking offline more than a thousand websites and applications worldwide. Platforms including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, and even banks like Lloyds and Halifax were among those affected. According to Downdetector, reports of service interruptions surged to over 6.5 million globally during the incident, which began around 07:00 BST. Amazon announced that the issue had been resolved by noon, but experts said the event underscored the vulnerabilities of a digital ecosystem dominated by a few cloud computing giants. The company later attributed the disruption to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue involving the DynamoDB API in its US-EAST-1 region. DNS functions as the internet’s address book, converting domain names into numerical addresses computers can interpret; when it fails, websites become unreachable. Cybersecurity expert Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey remarked that the outage highlighted the heavy dependence of online services on third-party infrastructure. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince described the situation as an inevitable downside of large-scale cloud reliance. Technology policy specialist Cori Crider warned that the concentration of cloud services among Amazon, Microsoft, and Google poses systemic risks, arguing for diversification and more local alternatives to safeguard digital and economic resilience.