An AWS failure took down the internet Monday morning - and the aftershocks continue

picture alliance / Contributor / Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways 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 the 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 12:11 a.m. ET, it suffered a major outage, knocking out tons 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. Also: Where the cloud goes from here: 8 trends to follow and what it could all cost 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. In the UK and the EU, major banks, including Lloyds Banking Group, and some government sites were reported down as the disruption extended beyond North America. Also: The best cloud storage services: Expert tested According to DownForEveryoneOrJustForMe, thousands of users began reporting issues just after 3 a.m. 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. Data from Downdetector, a Ziff Davis-owned company, shows the massive scope of this morning's AWS outage. In the first two hours alone, more than 1 million reports came from the US, followed by 400,000 from the UK. By midmorning, total global reports had surged past 8.1 million, with 1.9 million from the US and 1 million from the UK. As of 1:03 p.m., AWS was still not fully healthy. The company reported, "We continue to apply mitigation steps for network load balancer health and recovering connectivity for most AWS services. Lambda is experiencing function invocation errors because an internal subsystem was impacted by the network load balancer health checks. We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system. For EC2 launch instance failures, we are in the process of validating a fix and will deploy to the first AZ as soon as we have confidence we can do so safely." Hang in there folks, this may take a while. 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? Mitigated but slow to recover 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. Amazon said the AWS outage was resolved by 6:35 a.m. ET, although some services like Ring and Chime remained slow to recover. Downdetector said it had logged over 6.5 million reports across more than 1,000 dependent services by 12:30 a.m. BST. Its data shows more than 2,000 companies experienced disruptions, with about 280 still affected as of late morning. Also: Slow internet at home? 3 things I always inspect first to get faster Wi-Fi speeds Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at Ookla, said the synchronized pattern across hundreds of services indicates "a core cloud incident rather than isolated app outages." He said the event underscores the importance of resilience and recommended organizations distribute workloads across multiple regions to reduce the impact of future outages. Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla's director of product, added that such large-scale outages are rare but may be occurring more often as companies increasingly centralize critical data and operations on single cloud providers. "This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year," Ramirez said. "They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform." If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-East-1, Amazon recommends 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." Also: Bad Wi-Fi at home? Try my 10 go-to ways to fix it this weekend Amazon will likely share a detailed postmortem explaining what went wrong in the coming days. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.