Monday's outage affected web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), causing a huge swath of the web to go down, including websites, banks and some government services. On Monday afternoon, the company provided an update on the cause of the problem and said it was working to restore service. Amazon announced at 6:01 p.m. ET that all AWS services have returned to normal operations.
In an announcement on Amazon's website, the company shared that the underlying issue is related to DNS resolution. DNS (Domain Name System) is a system that translates web addresses into IP addresses so that your customers' apps and websites can load them. Some issues can be resolved quickly, but DNS issues may take longer to resolve.
“AWS has reported increased error rates across multiple services and has determined that the issue is related to DNS resolution for DynamoDB API endpoints in the Northern Virginia (us-east-1) region,” the announcement states. “The underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 a.m. PDT.”
Although the issue has been resolved, Amazon said it needs more time to “fully restore service” and will respond “as soon as possible.” The company also said the issue affected customer support operations at Amazon.com and its subsidiaries, as well as AWS.
Amazon announced Monday night ET that the outage had been “fully alleviated” and that most services were returning to normal after a several-hour period in which much of the internet was unloadable.
Some major apps didn't work. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, Perplexity, Venmo, and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon's own services, including its Ring video surveillance products. The failure also shut down Eight Sleep's cooling pods, disrupting users' sleep.
Millions of businesses and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers around the world, and Amazon is said to control at least 30% of the entire cloud market.
Prior to this, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike released a buggy update to its anti-malware engine that crashed millions of computers around the world, causing airport delays and large-scale outages. It took several days for systems around the world to return to normal.
Prior to that, in 2021, DNS provider Akamai suffered an outage that caused some of the world's largest websites, including FedEx, Steam, and PlayStation Network, to be disconnected from the internet for several hours.
Amazon advised customers to refer to the AWS Health Dashboard for detailed information about the outage and how to resolve it.