An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has taken out vast swathes of the web, including websites, banks and some government services.
Amazon said on Monday morning that the outage had been “fully mitigated” and that most services are returning to normal after an hours-long stretch during which much of the internet could not load.
The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. east coast, on DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load.
While some glitches can resolve quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve.
Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance products.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market.
Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage.
Before this, the most recent global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant Crowdstrike published a buggy update to its anti-malware engine, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and resulting in airport delays and mass outages. Systems globally took several days to return to normal.
Prior to that, a malfunction at DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites to drop off the internet for several hours, including FedEx, Steam and the PlayStation Network.
