Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent the entire day fighting to bring its systems back online after a massive global outage knocked out some of the world’s most-used platforms, including Snapchat, Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Netflix, and even several airlines and banks.
Amazon had explained that the issue began deep inside an EC2 internal network, paralyzing services that rely on its cloud backbone. As Cryptopolitan previously reported, disruptions started early Monday and kept spreading, with no immediate fix in sight.
The monitoring site Downdetector has received more than 11 million reports of connectivity problems, affecting over 2,500 companies, as of press time.
Businesses described a total standstill; payments failed, customer portals froze, and even factory systems linked to AWS-based automation went silent.
Experts warned that the financial damage could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, given how much of global trade now runs through Amazon’s infrastructure.
Amazon confirms continuing errors as engineers work on EC2 and Lambda
In a series of updates, Amazon told customers it was “observing recovery across all AWS services,” but admitted that users might still face “intermittent function errors.” The company said that instance launches were starting to succeed again across multiple Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 region, a critical hub that powers large parts of the internet.
Amazon also detailed problems inside its Lambda computing service, explaining that some users would see temporary errors when making network requests. “To recover Lambda’s invocation errors, we slowed down the rate of SQS polling,” the company said. Engineers were now raising the polling rate again after seeing “more successful invocations and reduced function errors.”
The company added that EC2 launch failures were gradually easing. “Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances continue to progress,” Amazon said, adding that Lambda@Edge, which handles cloud operations near end-users, was also showing “significant improvement.”
Security experts moved quickly to calm speculation about a cyberattack. Bryson Bort, the chief executive of Scythe, told Al Jazeera that the situation was not the result of hacking or espionage.
“Whenever we see these headlines, people think it’s a cyberattack,” Bryson said. “And in this case, it’s not. Most of the time it isn’t. It’s usually human error.”
Digital rights advocates warn of dangerous over-reliance on cloud giants
The internet outage triggered a wider conversation about the fragility of the internet and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants. The digital rights organization Article 19 called the AWS collapse a “democratic failure.”]
Amazon’s head of digital issues, Corinne Cath-Speth, warned that the world needed diversification in cloud computing to prevent similar collapses. “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot depend on a handful of companies,” she said.
The scale of the financial hit is still being tallied, but CNN reported that it could easily reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, citing Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, an internet-performance tracking firm.
“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet,” Mehdi said. “The financial impact will easily reach hundreds of billions due to productivity losses for millions of workers who cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”
By late Monday, Amazon said recovery efforts were progressing, though many companies continued to struggle. Platforms like Snapchat, Venmo, and Coinbase were still reporting slowdowns and outages.
For much of the connected world, the outage served as a harsh reminder of how deeply everything (from crypto trading to global logistics) depends on a few Amazon data centers keeping the lights on.
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