Key Takeaways
- Over 1,000 website and services went dark for four hours this morning due to an Amazon Web Services outage.
- The problem: DNS resolution failed to work properly at Amazon Web Services, causing outages in the US-East-1 region.
- Most sites are now functioning properly.
A significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted a long list of major websites for hours this morning.
Among the impacted sites and services were: Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Duolingo, Zoom, Airtable, Perplexity AI, and Roblox, among others. Even the McDonald’s app was down.
Now, many sites are already back to 100%, and Amazon says that it is “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”
What Went Wrong: DNS Resolution
The Alexa smart assistant was also among the services that stopped working due to this outage, and messaging platforms including Signal and Slack also reported issues.
What caused the outage in the first place? The details still aren’t entirely confirmed, but Amazon has issued a statement about its web services failure: DNS resolution failed to work properly at Amazon Web Services, causing outages in the US-East-1 region.
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After publishing an initial update stating that they “are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” Amazon followed up with another update a few hours later.
“We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.” -Amazon
The Outage Highlights Internet Consolidation Concerns
This new outage has highlighted the dangers of over-reliance on a small group of companies powering today’s internet. “This is what happens when one company has a 30% share of the global cloud computing market,” one commenter noted.
Those living in smart homes may have had a bad morning, with alarm clocks set by Alexa not having gone off, while any appliances or thermostats connected to the cloud may have refused to play ball.
The work week got off to a bad start as well, given that many work software systems failed, from Canva to Slack to accounting platforms like Xero or project management software like monday.com.
Over a Thousand Websites Went Down
It’s a big deal when even just a few major websites, like the Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, stop working at the same time. During this outage, according to the outage watchdog Downdetector, well over 1,000 companies were impacted.
Many rely on these websites and platforms for communication and news in addition to work functions — Downdetector fielded more than 6.5 million reports globally. Even payment platforms were down, including Venmo and Capital One online banking.
Hopefully, outages like this one can highlight the value of a broad range of diverse companies supporting core internet functions like cloud hosting.
One thing’s for sure, however: There’s no denying that the internet is now central to daily life around the world in 2025.
