Amazon identifies the issue that broke much of the internet today, but is still working to restore services

An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has taken out vast swathes of the web, including websites, banks, and some government services. On Monday afternoon, the company offered an update on the cause of the issue and noted it was still not yet resolved. In an announcement published to the Amazon website, the company shared that the underlying issue was related to DNS resolution. DNS, or domain name system, is a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load. “AWS reported increased error rates for multiple services and determined that the issue was related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region,” the announcement states. “The underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.” Though the issue itself has been fixed, Amazon notes that it’s still working to “fully restore service as quickly as possible.” The company also said that the issue affected its own website, Amazon.com and its subsidiaries, as well as AWS customer support operations. Amazon advised customers to refer to the AWS Health Dashboard for the latest information Amazon said on Monday morning that the outage had been “fully mitigated” and that most services are returning to normal after an hours-long stretch during which much of the internet could not load. The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast. While some glitches can resolve quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve. Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal, and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance products. Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market. Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage. Before this, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike published a buggy update to its anti-malware engine, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and resulting in airport delays and mass outages. Systems globally took several days to return to normal. Prior to that, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites to drop off the internet for several hours, including FedEx, Steam, and the PlayStation Network.