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Amazon accidentally turned off large portions of the internet on Monday morning.
A problem at Amazon's cloud computing service disrupted internet use around the world early Monday, taking down dozens of online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world's biggest organizations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press.
Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses so websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.
"The world now runs on the cloud," and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, Burgess said.
Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon's own services, including its Ring video surveillance products.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market.
Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage.
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-east-internet-services-outage-654a12ac9aff0bf4b9dc0e22499d92d7
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/
(Score: 4, Informative) by jb on Wednesday October 22 2025, @06:26AM
That's a bit of a long bow to draw. Not convinced that taking one AS offline qualifies as a "large portion of the Internet". Remember, some time ago the 16 bit ASN space was exhausted, so we know for sure that there are more than 64k ASes out there. Granted Amazon is one of the largest of them, but it's still only one.
Only that subset of the world that doesn't care at all about control over its own computing. This should be a wake up call for many. If what you're using it for is no more important than a toy, then yes "the cloud" may well be a suitable home for it. But anything more serious than that requires sufficient direct control: ideally in-house, or failing that at the very least in a third-party data centre of known, constant location, with on-site access to the racks you rent there.