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Amazon says its systems are largely back online after a massive outage in its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), brought down thousands of major websites, apps, and online platforms around the world on Monday.
In an afternoon update, Amazon said, “We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services.” The company confirmed that most of its cloud operations were restored, though one of its key products — Lambda — continued to return errors. Lambda allows customers to write and deploy code for their products without managing the underlying infrastructure, and Amazon said it is working to bring that service back online.
Earlier in the day, Amazon had announced that it had “fully mitigated” the initial outage, but connectivity issues quickly resurfaced, creating another wave of disruptions. Among those affected were major social media platforms like Snapchat and Facebook, gaming services such as Fortnite, financial firms including Coinbase, and airlines like Delta and United. AI firm Perplexity and several banks also reported problems.
According to Amazon, the outage originated from its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) network — the backbone that lets companies rent virtual servers to run and scale their applications. The company traced the disruption to an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the load on the EC2 network, which malfunctioned and caused cascading issues across its infrastructure.
Amazon temporarily throttled customers’ ability to launch new EC2 instances to stabilize the system, and later said it was “seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services.”
The outage underscored the extent of global reliance on AWS, which accounts for 37% of the worldwide cloud market, generated $107.6 billion in revenue in 2024, and operates across 38 regions using more than six million kilometers of fiber optic cabling. Its customers include Disney, the U.S. Army, Capital One, United Airlines, and the NFL.
Internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint estimated the financial toll could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. CEO Mehdi Daoudi said, “The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on it. The financial impact will easily reach hundreds of billions due to lost productivity, halted business operations, and disruptions across industries.”
Reports of service problems surged throughout the day. Downdetector recorded over 15,000 outage reports for Amazon at the peak, with thousands more for Snapchat, Google, Venmo, and Delta. Ookla noted that five million outage reports came from the United States in the first two hours alone, while over 400,000 were filed in the United Kingdom.
By late afternoon, Amazon said it was seeing steady recovery across regions and services. Still, the widespread disruption served as a stark reminder of how deeply AWS underpins global internet operations — and how vulnerable the modern digital ecosystem remains to failures in a single company’s infrastructure.
