On Monday, a significant outage of Amazon’s cloud computing service caused widespread internet disruptions globally, impacting various online platforms such as social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial services.

This incident underscored the modern world’s growing reliance on a small number of companies for critical internet infrastructure, which generally operates smoothly until unexpected breakdowns occur.

Approximately three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported that recovery efforts were underway, though some users continued to experience issues. AWS is a pivotal cloud computing provider for numerous major institutions, including government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses like The Associated Press.

Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert, noted that a “slow and bumpy recovery process” is typically expected in such situations.

He explained that as engineers implement solutions across the cloud infrastructure, smaller disruptions might arise as part of the recovery process.

“It’s similar to what happens after a large-scale power outage: While a city’s power is coming back online, neighborhoods may see intermittent glitches as crews finish the repairs,” said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Amazon blames domain name system

Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system that converts web addresses into IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. Those addresses allow websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices.

DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies. Users reported trouble with the social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, the online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and the education app Canvas, as well as Netflix, Disney+ and many other services.

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Signal chat app both said on X that they were experiencing trouble related to the outage.

Even Amazon’s own services were not immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.

“I currently can’t grade any online assignments, and my students can’t access their online materials” because of the outage’s effect on learning-management systems, said Damien P. Williams, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

This is not the first time issues with Amazon cloud services have caused widespread disruptions.

Many popular internet services were affected by a brief outage in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when a wide range of companies – from airlines and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services – were affected for more than five hours. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017.

The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern time, when AWS reported on its “health dashboard” that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Later, the company reported that there were “significant error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.

Around 6 a.m. Eastern time, the company reported seeing recovery across most of the affected services and said it was seeking a “full resolution.” As of midday, AWS was still working to resolve the trouble.

Sixty-four internal AWS services were affected, the company said.

Just a few companies provide most internet infrastructure

Because much of the world now relies on three or four companies to provide the underlying infrastructure of the internet, “when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful” across many online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” Burgess said.

And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by so few companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.

“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast” to resolve, and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyberattack, Burgess said.

“This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue. Something’s gone wrong, and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.

There are “well-established processes” to deal with outages at AWS, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, Burgess said, adding that such outages are usually over in “hours rather than days.”

___

Associated Press videojournalist Mustakim Hasnath in London contributed to this report.