Major AWS Outage Now Mitigated: Global Impact and What Happened

A large-scale disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier today caused major outages across websites and apps worldwide, affecting users from the Americas to Europe and Asia. The company later confirmed that the issue has been mitigated, restoring normal operations to most affected platforms.

It started as a technical problem in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia and turned into a worldwide disruption. Early in the morning, AWS reported high error rates and delays across several of its services.

The issue was traced to a problem in DNS resolution for its DynamoDB service, which handles database queries for many global clients. This led to service interruptions across a long list of popular platforms, from entertainment to finance.

The outage spread fast because many online services depend on AWS infrastructure, even outside the United States. When the US-East-1 region experiences issues, it often affects global networks that route through it for database or traffic management.

AWS explained that the incident originated from internal DNS problems that blocked access to the DynamoDB API endpoint, causing timeouts and service failures across dependent systems.

In the United States, the first signs appeared around 3 a.m. Eastern Time. Users started reporting problems with apps like Reddit, Snapchat, Signal, Venmo, and gaming platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox.

Financial services, including Robinhood and Coinbase Global, also went offline. Several airlines reported temporary disruptions to their reservation systems, while even Amazon’s own Alexa and Ring services were affected.

Across the United Kingdom and Europe, users faced similar outages throughout the morning. UK government websites, including the HMRC login and benefits portal, went down briefly, alongside online banking platforms like Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and the Bank of Scotland.

Popular consumer apps such as Duolingo, Canva, and Wordle were also hit. Reports from outage tracker websites showed a sharp rise in user complaints across the region, with more than a million incidents logged in the UK alone.

In the Asia-Pacific region, users in Australia, Singapore, and Japan experienced service delays and connectivity issues. Local reports indicated that global applications hosted in the US-East-1 region were unreachable for several hours. Although AWS has multiple data centers worldwide, many apps use shared global infrastructure, which made the impact widespread despite the regional origin of the fault.

By mid-morning in the UK, AWS confirmed that the “underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated.” The company said services had been restored but warned that some customers might continue to experience slower response times as systems stabilised. AWS’s Status page later showed that core functions such as EC2 instance launches and database connections were returning to normal.

In addition to Snapchat, Fortnite, and Signal, the disruption hit financial tools like Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase, productivity apps like Slack and Airtable, and even fast-food apps such as McDonald’s.

“This is, of course, not the first major outage we have experienced in recent memory; only a little over a year ago, a Microsoft outage caused airports and banks to grind to a halt. Modern life, especially after the pandemic, has become dependent on virtual connectivity and systems. It isn’t that long ago that most people carried cash and would have been perfectly able to bridge a banking issue without complications. However, nowadays, cashless payments are the norm, and most of us don’t habitually carry cash anymore,” said Mona Schroedel, a specialist data protection lawyer at Freeth.

“As with the law in this area, the need for practical review and adjustments just cannot keep up with the speed of advancement. That leaves end users vulnerable to being negatively impacted if the few big providers are targeted or have a technical issue. More ought to be done to ensure that there are (a) backup systems for critical services and (b) that the practical aspects of our modern convenient virtual life are reviewed and regulated.”

This is not the first time an AWS issue has caused a worldwide outage affecting major companies. In March 2017, as reported by Hackread.com, the same AWS facility in Virginia experienced technical problems that took several popular sites offline for hours.

Those affected included RunKeeper, Medium, Trello, Imgur, Giphy, SoundCloud, Quora, Business Insider, Coursera, Time Inc., and many others.

By the time AWS issued its final update, most services had resumed normal operation, and user reports began to decline. The company has not yet provided full technical details of the cause, but said that it will continue to investigate the event to prevent recurrence. But for now, services are back online, and AWS reports that all systems are operational again.

Commenting on the outage, Mona Schroedel, a specialist data protection lawyer at Freeth, said the incident shows how dependent modern life has become on digital infrastructure.

“This is not the first major outage we have experienced in recent memory. Just over a year ago, a Microsoft disruption caused airports and banks to grind to a halt. Modern life, especially after the pandemic, relies heavily on virtual systems. It wasn’t that long ago that most people carried cash and could easily manage a banking issue without major inconvenience. Now, with cashless payments being the norm, very few of us keep physical money on hand,” she explained.

She added that legal and regulatory frameworks have not kept pace with the rapid expansion of digital services. “As with the law in this area, the need for practical review and adjustment just cannot keep up with the speed of advancement. That leaves end users vulnerable when a few large providers face technical failures or targeted incidents. More should be done to make sure there are proper backup systems for critical services and that the practical aspects of our connected lives are regularly reviewed and regulated.”