Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Global internet

AWS Outage: How Virginia’s Data Center Hub Brought Down the Internet

A single glitch in Northern Virginia brought down much of the internet — from Reddit to airlines — highlighting the risks of a centralized cloud economy.

A Digital Blackout Begins in Virginia

Early Monday morning, millions of users around the world lost access to their favorite apps and online services. The cause: a massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), traced to its US-EAST-1 region — a sprawling 385-acre cluster of data centers in Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of cloud infrastructure on Earth.

The outage began around 3 a.m. ET and rippled outward throughout the day. By sunrise, more than 100 AWS services were affected, according to Amazon’s own status page. Websites and apps including Reddit, Snapchat, Venmo, Robinhood, Signal, Perplexity AI, and Amazon.com itself went dark. Airlines such as United and Delta, and tools like Slack, Teams, Zoom, and Asana also reported disruptions.

AWS said it had “fully mitigated the underlying issue” by early afternoon, with all 142 affected services restored by 6:53 p.m. ET. However, the recovery came in waves, with repeated “significant API errors and connectivity issues” appearing throughout the morning and early afternoon.

Inside the AWS Failure

Amazon attributed the incident to a problem with its internal network load-balancer subsystem — the system that routes data traffic between its massive clusters of servers. The failure also caused errors in DNS resolution, the critical process that translates web addresses into IP numbers, effectively breaking the internet’s “phone book.”

At 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS reported “significant API errors and connectivity issues” across multiple services, all within the US-EAST-1 region. By 12:13 p.m. ET, engineers had taken “additional mitigation steps” to stabilize the system, and by 3:01 p.m. PT, Amazon said that “all AWS services returned to normal operations.”

Yet the effects of the outage underscored a larger structural vulnerability: how a single regional failure can paralyze much of the digital economy.

The Internet’s Hidden Center: Northern Virginia

Virginia’s Loudoun County — dubbed “Data Center Alley” — hosts 663 data centers, more than any other U.S. state, out of roughly 4,000 nationwide. Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region there is the company’s oldest and largest cloud hub, powering vast portions of global traffic.

“If you’re going to use AWS, you’re going to use US-EAST-1 regardless of where you are on planet Earth. That presents a fragility for modern society and the modern economy.”
– Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik.

With AWS controlling 41% of the cloud market, according to Gartner, the global internet has grown increasingly dependent on a handful of hyperscale regions concentrated in Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland.

A Chain Reaction Across the Web

Reports from DownDetector showed waves of failure through the day. Amazon, Venmo, and Pinterest experienced early-morning spikes, while Zoom, Strava, and Alexa followed. Even telecoms giants like AT&T and Verizon saw user-reported problems—not because their networks failed, but because customers couldn’t connect to services hosted on AWS.

United Airlines temporarily lost access to its booking system, forcing backups to be activated. Robinhood and Snapchat publicly confirmed outages, and Perplexity AI’s CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X that his company’s downtime stemmed directly from AWS issues.

While the cloud provider restored most operations within hours, the outage served as a vivid demonstration of what happens when global platforms depend on a small number of centralized providers.

Concentration Equals Risk

The benefits of cloud computing are clear: scalability, cost efficiency, and global reach. But this outage made the trade-offs painfully obvious.

“Companies providing online services often choose large cloud platforms rather than building and maintaining their own infrastructure. Outages like this can ripple outward in a number of ways. When those components can’t be reached, performance degrades or the wider service fails.”
– Hisham Ibrahim, Chief Community Officer at RIPE-NCC

Even as AWS resolved the issue, businesses were left scrambling. Some suffered direct downtime; others saw cascading slowdowns as systems attempted to reroute traffic or reconnect to broken authentication and database services.

Lessons from a Global Wake-Up Call

This is far from the first global outage caused by a single point of failure. In July 2024, a faulty software update from CrowdStrike grounded planes and froze hospital networks worldwide. Similar disruptions hit the internet in 2022, 2021, and 2019, often tied to configuration errors or software bugs.

“Today’s outage is another reminder that the digital world doesn’t stop at borders — a local fault can ripple worldwide in minutes. We’ve built convenience on shared systems, but resilience still depends on people and process.”
– Charlotte Wilson, Head of Enterprise at Check Point Software.

Despite the chaos, the core internet infrastructure — 76,000 interconnected networks — remained intact. The web itself didn’t break; our reliance on a few hyperscale cloud operators did.

The Road Ahead

As cloud services underpin more of the global economy — from AI inference models to fintech transactions — resilience must become a top priority.

Enterprises and governments should diversify across regions, providers, and architectures to avoid repeating this scenario.

In the end, Monday’s AWS outage was more than an inconvenience. It was a glimpse into a fragile future where the failure of one building in Virginia can bring the world’s digital life to a halt.