An outage on Monday affected web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking down huge areas of the web, including websites, banks and some government services. On Monday afternoon, the company offered an update on the cause of the problem and said it was working to restore service. At 6:01 p.m. ET, Amazon said all AWS services are back to normal operation.
In one communication on Amazon’s website, the company shared that the underlying issue is related to DNS resolution. DNS, or the Domain Name System, is a system that translates web addresses into IP addresses so that customer applications and websites can be loaded. While some glitches can be resolved quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve.
“AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined that the issue was related to the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia region (us-east-1),” the announcement said. “The underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.”
Although the problem itself was fixed, Amazon needed more time to “fully restore service,” which it said it was doing “as soon as possible.” The company also said the issue affected Amazon.com and its affiliates, as well as AWS customer support operations.
Amazon said Monday afternoon EST that the outage had been “fully mitigated” and that most services were back to normal after an extended hour during which much of the Internet could not load.
Many major applications were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Slogan, Embarrassment, Venmoand Zoom faced long outages, as did Amazon own servicesincluding Ring video surveillance products. The outage even disrupted the Eight Sleep’s coolers, annoyingly users’ sleep.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, applications, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers around the world and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market.
Before that, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike released a bug update to its anti-malware engine, crashing millions of computers around the world and resulting in airport delays and mass outages. Systems worldwide took several days to return to normal.
Before that, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s biggest websites to go offline for several hours, including FedEx, Steam and the PlayStation Network.
Amazon advised customers to refer to AWS Health Dashboard for more detailed information about the outage and how to resolve it.
