On Monday, a widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused major disruptions across the internet, rendering numerous popular websites and services inaccessible for several hours. Beginning shortly after midnight Pacific Time, the outage affected thousands of companies and millions of users worldwide, underscoring the internet’s heavy reliance on a handful of critical cloud infrastructure providers like AWS.
The disruption started in the early hours of October 20, 2024, when AWS first reported increased error rates and latency issues in its US-East-1 region, a key data center hub located in northern Virginia. This region is vital not only for Amazon but also for many other internet-based companies, supporting services across the United States and Europe. As a result, the outage quickly rippled across the web, affecting a diverse range of platforms including social media giant Snapchat, popular online game Fortnite, payment service Venmo, the PlayStation Network, and even Amazon’s own retail site.
The scope of the outage was massive. Over 2,000 companies experienced disruptions, with critical services such as online banking also impacted. According to reports tracked by Downdetector—a service that monitors outages—there were nearly 10 million problem reports globally, with the United States alone accounting for about 2.7 million. Other countries with notable numbers of affected users included the UK, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Many customers found themselves locked out of services they rely on daily, leading to frustration and confusion.
AWS took roughly three and a half hours to fully resolve the issue, with the outage peaking before dawn on the U.S. East Coast and then resurging around 8 a.m. Pacific Time as users on the West Coast logged on for the day. This resurgence could have been due to an increase in user traffic or residual technical issues exacerbated by the load. By mid-morning, Amazon reported that most services were recovering, although some customers using AWS Lambda—a serverless compute service—continued to experience intermittent errors due to ongoing network connectivity problems.
AWS’s public updates provided some insight into the cause of the outage but were initially vague. Early in the incident, the company cited a “DNS issue” as a probable cause. DNS, or the Domain Name System, is a fundamental part of the internet that translates human-readable web addresses (like cnet.com) into machine-readable IP addresses. When DNS fails, browsers cannot connect to websites, leading to widespread outages. Later updates revealed the root cause was linked to an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of AWS’s network load balancers—key components that distribute incoming internet traffic across servers.
The implications of this outage extend beyond mere inconvenience. It highlighted a critical vulnerability in the current architecture of the internet: the concentration of so much digital infrastructure within a small number of cloud providers. AWS is one of the largest cloud service platforms globally, and many companies, large and small, depend on its infrastructure. When AWS experiences problems, it’s not just Amazon’s services that suffer, but a vast ecosystem of dependent websites and applications. This phenomenon is reminiscent of past outages involving other major service providers like Fastly and Crowdstrike, which similarly demonstrated how a single point of failure can cascade across the web.
Industry experts see the episode as a stark reminder of the need for increased resilience in cloud computing strategies. Luke Kehoe, an analyst at Ookla, pointed out that many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region or provider, which can dramatically increase the “blast radius” of an incident. Distributing applications and data across multiple regions and availability zones can help reduce the impact of such outages, ensuring that if one area fails, others remain operational.
The outage also raises cybersecurity concerns. While there is no evidence suggesting malicious activity caused the AWS disruption, technical faults can open doors for cyber attackers seeking to exploit vulnerabilities during times of instability. Marijus Briedis, CTO of NordVPN, emphasized that online security is not just about defending against hackers but also about maintaining connectivity and protection when systems fail. He warned users to be vigilant in the aftermath of such incidents, as scammers often attempt to capitalize on the confusion by launching phishing attacks or fraudulent communications urging people to change passwords or take other security actions.
Throughout the outage, Amazon maintained communication primarily through its AWS health dashboard, providing periodic updates on the situation. By 3:35 a.m. PT, AWS announced that the underlying DNS issue had been fully mitigated and most services were returning to normal.