The news: Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage early Monday morning that continued to disrupt services until nearly 7pm ET, degrading performance for the nearly one-third of the web that uses AWS for cloud storage.
- More than a thousand websites and apps—including Alexa, Disney+, Reddit, McDonald’s, Facebook, United Airlines, Coinbase, Perplexity, and Canva, per The Verge—were inaccessible in the early hours, with many facing intermittent access problems throughout the day.
- UK government websites, fintech platforms, and cloud-based games like Roblox and Fortnite were also down, along with Amazon services.
What happened? The AWS Health Dashboard released an official statement explaining that the problem began in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region just after 3am ET, describing it as an “operational issue causing increased error rates and latencies” affecting multiple services. It blamed the failure on a DNS issue with DynamoDB.
The operational failure made evident how deeply modern commerce, communication, and entertainment depend on a single cloud backbone. More than 8.1 million outage reports were filed globally, per ZDNET, with the heaviest impact felt across North America and Europe.
Why it matters: The disruption’s scale mirrors 2024’s Microsoft outage, which grounded flights and crippled businesses worldwide. Both incidents revealed the problems with failing to diversify cloud providers.
Digital ecosystems are scaling faster than their safeguards. Overreliance on single services endangers brand reputation and customer trust.
What this means for brands: Businesses reliant on a single cloud vendor could face operational, legal, and reputational risks when outages hit public services, banks, and travel sectors simultaneously.
Brands should audit vendor dependencies, test crisis communication flows, and prioritize multi-cloud failover readiness to safeguard user experience during inevitable disruptions.