On Monday, due to a massive AWS outage, the internet collectively held its breath, originating from Amazon Web Services (AWS), crippled services worldwide. The disruption, which spanned finance, gaming, social media, and even mandatory utilities, sent shockwaves through the digital economy. While the services have almost been restored, the event serves as a critical case study in modern internet dependency and cloud infrastructure resilience. But a lot of websites from all over the world will be out of action for much of the day.

A lot of companies were affected due to the outage, including Zoom, Snapchat, Coinbase, Roblox, HMRC, and even financial banking services like Bank of Scotland, Halifax, and Lloyds.

The main cause of this big issue was a malfunction at Amazon Web Services. According to the Amazon engineers, the core issue was centered in their primary US-EAST-1 Region data centers in Northern Virginia. In the beginning, AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies,” but later pinpointed the technical trigger: a failure in the Domain Name System (DNS) resolution for their DynamoDB service endpoints.

According to AWS, the cloud division has returned to normal operations. The technicians professionally mitigated the underlying DNS problem, but the cascading effects on other crucial components, like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) meant a slow, phased recovery.