Amazon accidentally turned of 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 [apnews.com]
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/ [techcrunch.com]