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A major AWS outage disrupted global websites, apps, and services.
The issue stemmed from a DNS failure in AWS's US-East-1 region.
In latest update, Amazon said the AWS outage has been resolved.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the backbone of much of the modern Internet. Early Monday morning, at approximately 12:11am ET, AWS suffered a major outage. This failure knocked out dozens of websites, apps, and online platforms worldwide. The disruption originated in the company's critical US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, AWS's largest and most essential data hub.
Widespread slowdowns and timeouts
AWS first acknowledged the issue when it detected increased error rates and latency across numerous key services, including EC2, Lambda, and DynamoDB -- Amazon's cloud database technology. Engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint, which cascaded across dependent systems.
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Yes, that's right. The old techie joke that whenever there's a network problem, it's always DNS proved true yet again.
As the outage spread, AWS's service health dashboard confirmed that 28 separate AWS services were impacted, causing widespread slowdowns and timeouts across cloud operations.
The effects rippled across critical sectors, knocking out access to major consumer platforms such as Snapchat, Ring, Alexa, Roblox, and Hulu, as well as financial and AI services like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Perplexity. Even Amazon.com and Prime Video experienced partial outages.
HuluIn the UK and the European Union, major banks, including Lloyds Banking Group and some government sites, were reported down as the disruption extended far beyond North America.
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According to DownForEveryoneOrJustForMe, thousands of users began reporting issues just after 3am ET, with more than 14,000 outage reports logged for Amazon alone by midmorning. Smart home systems relying on AWS, such as Ring doorbells and Alexa-enabled devices, ceased functioning or lost connectivity, highlighting the deep dependency many households and companies have on Amazon's cloud.
Needless to say, social media was filled with user complaints and speculation as outages cascaded into retail, streaming, gaming, and financial operations worldwide. It turns out we're not happy without our Internet. Who knew?
Fully mitigated
AWS engineers originally stated they are "working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery," with the investigation centered on network gateway errors in the US East Coast region.
In its most recent update, Amazon said the AWS outage has been resolved. Outages began around 3:11am ET and were fixed by 6:35am, though some services like Ring and Chime remained slow to recover.
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If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, Amazon recommend flushing your DNS caches. "The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now," Amazon said. "Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution."
Amazon will likely share a detailed postmortem explaining what went wrong in the coming days.
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