Amazon Web Services experienced a massive outage on Monday morning that disrupted numerous major platforms including Snapchat, Coinbase, Robinhood, and banking apps, exposing the fragility of centralized cloud infrastructure and affecting millions of users globally.
The problems began just after midnight US Pacific Time on October 19, when AWS noticed increased error rates for multiple services in its US-EAST-1 Region hosted in Northern Virginia. By 3:11 a.m. ET, AWS reported an “operational issue” affecting 14 different services, though the scope would prove far more extensive.
The root cause stemmed from DNS resolution issues with DynamoDB, Amazon’s database service that underpins many other AWS applications. When DynamoDB’s endpoint couldn’t be reached, a cascading failure rippled through interconnected systems. In total, 113 services were affected by the outage, including AWS’s EC2 internal network, which affected launching new computing instances.
The disruption highlighted how much of modern life depends on cloud infrastructure. Websites and services ranging from Snapchat to the McDonald’s app and Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras to gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite were affected. The Downdetector website received 6.5 million reports that more than 1,000 sites and services around the world were offline.
Financial services bore significant impact. Coinbase confirmed that many users were unable to access the platform, though the company reassured customers that “all funds are safe”. Robinhood users similarly faced trading disruptions during morning market hours. In the United Kingdom, customers of banks including Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax reported issues while attempting to log into their accounts.
Airlines weren’t spared either. United Airlines said the global outage disrupted access to its app and website overnight, with some internal systems temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays as a result of the outage. Passengers reported being unable to find reservations online, check in, or drop bags at certain locations.
AWS said at 6:35 a.m. ET that the database problem causing the outage was “fully mitigated”, but that initial optimism proved premature. At 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region”, indicating the situation remained unstable despite earlier declarations.
The problem involved an error with Amazon’s EC2 internal network, which affected DynamoDB, SQS, Amazon Connect and other AWS services. AWS explained that “the root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers”, essentially a system that checks whether network equipment is functioning properly.
By 6:53 p.m. ET, AWS announced that “all AWS services returned to normal operations”, though some services continued processing backlogs of messages accumulated during the disruption. The hours-long outage represented one of AWS’s most significant failures in recent years.
The incident exposed a critical vulnerability in how the internet functions today. Some AWS features, including global account management, IAM updates, and certain control APIs, are served from US-EAST-1 even if companies run workloads in other regions like Europe. This architectural decision meant that problems in Virginia cascaded globally, affecting services that appeared geographically distant from the failure point.
Communication platforms struggled throughout the day. Affected communication apps included WhatsApp, Signal, Zoom and Slack, disrupting remote work and personal conversations. Gaming services like Roblox, Fortnite and Xbox went dark for players expecting their usual entertainment. Even smart home devices became unresponsive as Ring doorbells and Alexa-enabled devices lost connection to AWS servers.
The outage also brought down critical tools inside Amazon itself, with warehouse and delivery employees reporting that internal systems were offline at many sites. Some warehouse workers were instructed to stand by in break rooms and loading areas during their shift, while they couldn’t load Amazon’s Anytime Pay app. This internal disruption revealed how thoroughly Amazon relies on its own infrastructure.
Seller Central, the hub used by Amazon’s third-party sellers to manage their businesses, was also knocked offline, potentially costing merchants sales during business hours. The financial impact extended beyond public-facing services to the operational backbone supporting Amazon’s massive marketplace ecosystem.
Elon Musk seized the opportunity for competitive messaging. As nearly every corner of the internet was affected, Musk was gloating that his X platform was not affected, later posting memes making fun of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. Whether X truly avoided all impact or simply doesn’t rely as heavily on AWS infrastructure remains unclear.
The timing proved particularly problematic for certain services. Medicare seemed to be affected, with users trying to participate in its open enrollment period saying they couldn’t log in to the website Monday afternoon. Healthcare access disruptions during critical enrollment windows could have lasting consequences for individuals seeking coverage.
AWS acknowledged the outage and said engineers were “immediately engaged” to fix the problem, working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery”. The company promised to publish a detailed post-event summary explaining what happened, standard practice after major incidents affecting millions of users.
AWS is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for around a third of the market, ahead of Microsoft and Google. This dominant market position means AWS outages produce disproportionately large impacts compared to failures at smaller providers. When the biggest player stumbles, significant portions of the internet stumble with it.
Any organization whose resiliency plans extend to duplicating resources across two or more different cloud platforms will no doubt be feeling vindicated, though such redundancy costs money. Many companies gamble that AWS’s reliability justifies placing all eggs in one basket, but Monday’s outage challenged that calculus.
Cloud outages are not rare, but they have become more noticeable as more companies rely on these services every day. Market analyst Joshua Mahony noted that “the fallout impacted people across a number of different spheres,” though he predicted Amazon would weather the storm because “their businesses are deeply ingrained”.
The incident recalls the July 2024 CrowdStrike disaster. A faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike revealed the fragility of global technology infrastructure when it caused Microsoft Windows systems to go dark, creating millions of dollars worth of chaos and grounding thousands of flights. Both incidents underscore how technological interdependence creates systemic risk.
Nicky Stewart, Senior Advisor at the Open Cloud Coalition, called Monday’s massive AWS outage “a visceral reminder of the risks of over-reliance on two dominant cloud providers”. The comment referenced AWS and Microsoft Azure, which together control roughly two-thirds of the global cloud infrastructure market alongside Google Cloud.
For Ghana and other developing economies increasingly dependent on cloud-based services for banking, government operations, and business activities, the outage illustrated how infrastructure decisions made in Northern Virginia can instantly affect daily life thousands of miles away. As African businesses migrate operations to the cloud, understanding these dependencies becomes crucial for planning business continuity strategies.
The episode raises difficult questions about digital infrastructure resilience. Cloud operations are supposed to have built-in redundancy, yet a DNS issue in one region caused global disruption. Whether this prompts companies to diversify cloud providers or invest in hybrid infrastructure combining cloud and on-premises systems remains to be seen, but the conversation has certainly intensified.
Source: newsghana.com.gh
