Amazon Cloud Outage Fixed, Global Internet Back Online

For several hours on Monday, millions of people around the world struggled to access their favourite websites and apps. From streaming services and online stores to smart home devices and school portals, nearly everything connected to the internet seemed to be behaving strangely. The cause behind the chaos? A massive cloud service outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) — one of the biggest digital platforms powering much of the internet.

Amazon confirmed that a major technical issue in one of its primary data centres triggered the disruption. The problem began early Monday morning (GMT) and rapidly spread as AWS servers went offline one by one. This caused a global internet slowdown, with many websites loading extremely slowly or not at all.

According to Amazon’s official service health dashboard, the incident mainly affected its US-East-1 region, which plays a crucial role in running countless international apps and business operations. Many platforms depend on AWS to process their data and deliver online services, so when those servers failed, the effects were felt instantly across continents.

Some of the world’s most visited websites were hit by the outage. Popular platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, Airbnb, Reddit, and even government services like online payment portals reported downtime. Many users took to social media to share memes, complaints, and updates about not being able to access their accounts or use digital payment systems.

E-commerce sites also faced transactional errors, affecting orders and deliveries. In some regions, food delivery and ride-hailing apps temporarily went offline. For smaller startups that rely solely on AWS for cloud hosting, the outage was a heavy blow, interrupting operations and customer service.

Amazon engineers and cloud specialists worked quickly to identify the technical glitch. Within a few hours, they managed to stabilise the affected systems. In an official statement, Amazon Web Services said it had resolved the issue and normal operations were being restored gradually. The company also apologised to customers for the inconvenience.

By early Tuesday, web traffic had largely returned to normal in most parts of the world. While some minor disruptions continued for certain clients, the overall internet connection speed and reliability improved steadily.

Experts have compared this outage to previous AWS downtime events that have caused widespread digital slowdowns around the globe. Amazon hosts over a third of all cloud-based infrastructure used by major companies and organisations. This means when AWS suffers a problem, the ripple effects can reach almost everywhere.

Tech analysts say the latest incident highlights how deeply modern life depends on a few central cloud providers. Even a short-term interruption can affect online schooling, banking, gaming, remote work, and digital communication. Many experts are now urging businesses to adopt multi-cloud strategies — using more than one cloud service provider — to reduce such risks in the future.

While the internet is now recovering, the outage has served as an important reminder of the fragility of online systems. For everyday users, it showed how something as simple as checking email or streaming videos can suddenly stop working due to issues far beyond anyone’s control.

For IT professionals and developers, it’s another call to strengthen backup systems and ensure data redundancy. Many companies are also reviewing their cloud dependency policies following the disruption.

Amazon has promised a detailed report explaining the root cause of the failure and steps being taken to prevent similar problems. Meanwhile, tech industry leaders and cloud engineers are expected to meet in upcoming digital infrastructure forums to discuss ways to make global networks more resilient.

Despite the temporary panic, the quick response and transparent communication from AWS have helped restore confidence. By Tuesday morning, most websites, apps, and online tools were functioning normally again. As internet users breathe a sigh of relief, one thing has become clearer than ever — the world’s dependence on cloud computing continues to grow, and keeping it reliable is more important than ever before.

With inputs from agencies

Image Source: Multiple agencies