AWS outage affected millions trying to fly, game, shop and trade

An update to Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused day-long outages on Monday affecting millions worldwide trying to access gaming, trading platforms, ecommerce, social media, flights, and more.

According to Downdetector, over 11 million outages were reported, including more than three million in the US. Axios called it the most significant disruption since the CrowdStrike incident in 2024.

What happened?
AWS’ Domain Name System (DNS) update, which instructs machines how to find website links, misdirected traffic and failed to process requests.

The outage began around 2 a.m. ET and by 3 a.m. had spread beyond Amazon, affecting over 4,000 flights, financial platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood, and popular services like Slack, Zoom, Venmo, and Instacart.

Social media sites such as Snap, Reddit, and Duolingo, along with gaming platforms like Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, were inaccessible for several hours. AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Amazon-backed Perplexity were also impacted. In total, 142 AWS products experienced disruptions.

Though Amazon restored most services by late afternoon, the incident served as a stark reminder of how technical error can cascade into a major digital crisis.

Analysts estimate that $75 million per hour was lost every hour major websites were offline, with Amazon accounting for $72 million of those losses. AWS made $107.6 billion last year.

AWS manages around 30% of the web and the rest is by Microsoft and Google. The outage underscored the risks of centralized cloud infrastructure, prompting many companies to rethink and diversify their cloud strategies.