When AWS Fails, the Internet Feels It

On Monday, much of the Internet blinked out of existence for several hours. Snapchat stopped loading. Fortnite players were booted mid-game. Alexa went silent. Coinbase and Venmo froze transactions. Canva wouldn’t open. The world’s digital pulse stuttered because Amazon Web Services, the invisible backbone of the modern Internet, went down.

The disruption started early in the day in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, a sprawling data hub in Northern Virginia that quietly powers large parts of global web traffic. By the time users across Europe and Africa began noticing, the problem had already rippled through the infrastructure of dozens of apps, websites, and digital tools.

AWS engineers reported “increased error rates and latencies” across several services. For hours, businesses and consumers alike watched their digital tools grind to a halt before Amazon confirmed it was working on a fix. By late afternoon, the company announced that systems were “showing significant signs of recovery.”

But the damage had already been done.

The world’s hidden dependency

Most people never think about Amazon Web Services when they open their favorite app, but AWS quietly underpins much of the Internet. From small websites to billion-dollar platforms, it hosts the data, computation, and networking that make them function.

When AWS sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.

It’s not the first time this has happened. AWS outages have repeatedly exposed how fragile our interconnected systems are. Yet this one felt different, more widespread, more disruptive, and more revealing.

The platforms that went down weren’t obscure or niche. They were household names. Snapchat, Fortnite, Alexa, Duolingo, Coinbase, and Canva all went offline simultaneously. For a few hours, the idea that “the cloud never fails” collapsed in real time.

What actually broke

Amazon later traced the issue to its DynamoDB database service and DNS resolution problems in the Northern Virginia region. While technical on the surface, these two elements are foundational to how online services function. DynamoDB stores and retrieves data at high speed, while DNS acts like the Internet’s phone book, translating domain names into IP addresses.

When either of these falters, everything connected to them slows or stops. Multiply that by millions of dependent services, and the result is chaos.

Amazon insists this was not a cyberattack but a technical fault that spiraled into a chain reaction. Still, the fact that a localized failure could cause global disruption highlights just how concentrated Internet infrastructure has become.

The Myth of the Unbreakable Cloud

Cloud computing was supposed to make the Internet stronger. The idea was simple: distribute computing power across multiple servers and regions so that if one goes down, others can take over. In practice, that resilience depends on how companies configure their systems, and many take shortcuts for cost or simplicity.

Most businesses host their critical services in one region, often US-EAST-1, because it’s cheaper and easier to manage. But when that region fails, everything connected to it suffers.

“The outage exposes how brittle the digital world really is,” said cybersecurity expert Rafe Pilling of Sophos. “AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset.”

It’s a truth the industry prefers not to confront: global digital infrastructure is both powerful and precarious, built for efficiency rather than redundancy.

A monopoly on the cloud

Amazon controls roughly 31% of the global cloud market, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Together, these three giants run the digital foundations of modern business, government, and media. Their systems are vast but centralized, making them both indispensable and dangerous.

Dr. Corinne Cath-Speth of ARTICLE 19, a digital rights organization, argues that this concentration creates systemic risk. “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing,” she said. “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, journalism, and secure communications cannot depend on a handful of companies.”

In other words, when a single corporate entity like Amazon experiences a failure, it’s not just websites that go down. It’s communication, commerce, and even access to information.

The cost of a few hours offline

The financial impact of the outage hasn’t been fully calculated, but for many businesses, even an hour offline can translate into millions in lost revenue. Online retailers missed transactions. Creators couldn’t access their tools. Crypto exchanges saw temporary halts. Customer support lines flooded with complaints.

It’s easy to dismiss such an event as temporary inconvenience, but in an economy where digital uptime is everything, even short disruptions reveal how deeply fragile the system is.

Cloud reliability isn’t just a technical concern anymore. It’s an economic one, a political one, and even a social one.

Resilience Isn't Purchased, It's Designed

Cloud computing has been marketed as limitless, elastic, and immune to failure. Companies move to the cloud expecting peace of mind. But the AWS outage reminds us that resilience isn’t something you buy, it’s something you design for.

True redundancy means distributing workloads across multiple regions or even multiple providers. Few businesses do that because it’s expensive and complex. The trade-off is dependency. When you build your digital house on one platform, you live with its flaws.

For small startups and global enterprises alike, this outage is a case study in why “cloud-first” doesn’t mean “failure-proof.”

Building Higher on a Cracked Foundation

Each time AWS falters, the same conversation resurfaces: Should the Internet rely so heavily on one provider? Should businesses diversify? Should governments regulate cloud concentration?

Yet little changes. The convenience, performance, and scale that AWS offers are too compelling for most companies to resist. The world keeps building higher on the same fragile foundation, hoping the base won’t crack.

Until it does.

A Crisis of Concentration

This outage will fade from headlines, but the underlying problem remains. The Internet is vast in appearance but narrow in control. A few cloud providers hold disproportionate power over global communication and commerce.

As the world grows more digital, resilience must become a design priority, not an afterthought. That means multi-cloud architectures, regional backups, and policies that treat cloud dependency as a form of critical infrastructure risk.

The Internet isn’t broken, but it’s more fragile than most realize.

And every time AWS goes down, the illusion of infinite uptime dies a little more.