A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted large portions of the internet on Monday, taking down websites, apps, banks, and some government services for several hours.
The incident began around 3 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time and was traced to a DNS failure—a critical system that translates web addresses into IP addresses. Although Amazon said the issue was “fully mitigated” later in the day, many services experienced prolonged downtime.
The outage affected major apps including Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom, as well as Amazon’s own Ring video surveillance service.
AWS hosts websites and applications for millions of businesses worldwide and holds roughly 30% of the global cloud market. While Amazon has not disclosed the exact cause of the DNS malfunction, similar disruptions in recent years have had widespread impacts, including the 2024 CrowdStrike incident that crippled computers globally and the 2021 Akamai DNS failure that took major sites offline.
