Amazon Outage Disrupts Internet Use Across the Globe

Amazon says a massive outage of its cloud computing service has been resolved after disrupting internet use around the world for much of Monday.

The problem with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, began early in the morning and wasn’t fully fixed until about 6 p.m. Eastern. The outage knocked out or slowed down a wide range of online services — from social media and gaming to streaming, food delivery, and even financial platforms.

Amazon blamed the disruption on issues with its domain name system, which helps route internet traffic to the right addresses. Cybersecurity experts said the slow, bumpy recovery that followed was typical for such a large-scale breakdown.

DownDetector reported more than 11 million user complaints from over 2,500 companies, including Snapchat, Netflix, Disney+, Robinhood, and McDonald’s. Amazon’s own services — like Alexa, Ring doorbells, and Kindle downloads — were also affected.

The outage rippled through classrooms, too. Many students and teachers couldn’t access the Canvas learning platform used by half of North America’s colleges, including all Ivy League schools.

Experts say the incident underscores how dependent the world has become on a few cloud computing giants — like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — that power much of the modern internet.

Amazon says the outage was not caused by a cyberattack, and that its systems have now returned to normal.