At least a thousand companies were affected by Monday’s Amazon AWS outage, the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike incident, which caused more than 8.5 million systems to crash at several organizations, including many Fortune 1000 companies.
The AWS outage affected many popular online services ranging from Alexa, Snapchat and Venmo to gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. The incident underlines the fragility of companies that use cloud-based servers to host their data, and how suddenly businesses across the globe can be affected by an unplanned outage.
The event underscores just how dependent modern business operations are on a handful of cloud infrastructure providers. After more than nine hours of disruptions, some applications began to recover by 1 p.m. EST. However, AWS acknowledged that “elevated error rates” were still affecting several services and that it was working to fully restore connectivity.
According to outage tracking site Downdetector, reports of AWS disruptions peaked at over 9,300 users by early afternoon—up significantly from earlier in the day. AWS traced the issue to an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers, located within the “EC2 internal network,” which powers Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud platform.
EC2 is used by companies to run virtual servers to develop, launch and host applications. AWS said it was taking measures across affected data centers to resolve the problem and noted signs of early recovery, though no specific timeline for full restoration was provided.
The outage rippled across industries, impacting widely used apps. Media outlets including Disney, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal also reported disruptions.
More than a thousand companies were affected in total, according to Ookla, which owns Downdetector. “For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue,” said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at McGill and Partners.
Monday’s incident originated at AWS’s US-EAST-1 data center in northern Virginia—its oldest and largest facility—which has experienced outages in both 2020 and 2021. Because many organizations use US-EAST-1 as the default region for cloud operations, a single failure there can cause widespread disruption.
Experts say the outage serves as a stark reminder of how fragile digital infrastructures can be. “This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET. “The main issue is that so many large companies rely on the same few providers.”
While AWS has not indicated any evidence of a cyberattack, cybersecurity professionals note that events like this underscore the risks of concentration in the cloud computing market. As Rafe Pilling of Sophos explained, “AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset.”
For organizations that depend on the cloud, the takeaway is clear: diversification, data resilience, and ongoing monitoring are essential. Enfortra continues to advise businesses to prioritize cybersecurity readiness and redundancy planning to mitigate risks when—not if—major infrastructure outages occur.
