AWS Outage Exposes Internet’s Achilles Heel as Thousands of Sites Go Dark for Hours

The internet’s backbone cracked yesterday, leaving millions stranded in a digital wasteland. Amazon’sAMZN

Web Services division — controlling roughly one-third of the cloud market — suffered a major disruption that knocked over 1K sites offline for more than two hours. The culprit? A DNS malfunction at AWS’ northern Virginia data center that cascaded across its network, triggering 6.5M user complaints on Downdetector.

• Trading platforms RobinhoodHOOD
  and CoinbaseCOIN
  went dark, alongside SignalSIGL
  and WhatsAppMETA
  , sparking warnings about “democratic failures.”
• The outage also hit Medicare, HMRC, RobloxRBLX
  , and Fortnite, proving costly for Amazon, whose cloud unit makes up 17% of its 2024 revenue.

Déjà vu all over again: This isn’t AWS’ first rodeo — a Dec. 2021 outage lasted over five hours and disrupted everything from Netflix streams to Adele ticket sales, while another in 2023 caused similar chaos. Article 19’s Corinne Cath-Speth noted, “When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it… the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles.” Despite AWS declaring the database issue “fully mitigated,” connectivity problems persisted throughout the day as the company throttled new customer requests during recovery.