If some of your favorite apps or websites stopped working on Monday, you weren’t imagining things. A major outage hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) and caused a ripple effect across huge parts of the internet.
AWS is the backbone for a massive number of online tools and apps — from small business websites to giant companies like Netflix and United Airlines. So when AWS goes down, the internet feels it.
The problem started in Northern Virginia, where one of Amazon’s main data centers had a technical issue with its DNS (Domain Name System). That system helps route traffic to the right web addresses. When it failed, apps and services around the world suddenly couldn’t connect properly.
The outage began around 3 a.m. and wasn’t fully resolved until after 6 p.m., nearly 15 hours later. During that time, small businesses couldn’t process online payments, airline passengers couldn’t access flight info, and even Ring cameras went offline.
While the issue is now fixed, it was a strong reminder of how dependent we’ve all become on a few massive tech companies to keep the internet running. We think of the web as millions of independent sites, but in reality, much of it is built on shared cloud systems owned by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Hopefully, these companies learn from outages like this and continue building more backup systems to prevent widespread disruptions in the future. Because if one provider stumbles, we all feel it.
