The Domino Effect: How an AWS Glitch Brought Your Digital World to a Halt
Imagine trying to order your morning coffee through an app that won’t load. You check the news, but the website is down. You try to message a friend, but the service is unavailable. For millions of people on Monday, this wasn’t just a minor inconvenience; it was the reality of a major digital blackout.
A significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the powerful but often invisible engine behind a huge portion of the internet, sent ripples across the globe, taking down popular websites and apps for hours. The incident served as a stark reminder of our collective reliance on a concentrated cloud infrastructure and how quickly a single technical fault can disrupt daily life.
A Wide Web of Disruption
The list of affected services read like a who’s who of the digital economy. User reports flooded into sites like Downdetector, indicating widespread problems. The disruption didn’t discriminate, impacting:
- Travel: Customers of United Airlines and Delta Air Lines reported being unable to find reservations, check in online, or drop bags.
- Finance & Retail: Venmo, Robinhood, and even Amazon’s own site experienced issues. Lloyds Banking Group in the UK confirmed some of its services were affected, asking customers to “bear with us.”
- Entertainment & Social Media: Disney+, Snapchat, and Reddit were among the big names knocked offline.
- Government & Utilities: In the UK, crucial government portals like Gov.uk and the tax authority’s site, HM Revenue and Customs, were inaccessible.
- Emerging Tech: The AI search tool Perplexity and the crypto exchange Coinbase also reported major access problems, with Perplexity‘s CEO confirming the root cause was the AWS issue.
The common thread? All these diverse services rely on the massive computing power housed in AWS data centers.
The Technical Heart of the Problem
So, what exactly happened? In the early hours of the morning, AWS began reporting an “operational issue” affecting a staggering number of its own services over 70 in total. The company stated it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
While AWS provided limited technical details, cybersecurity experts were quick to offer insight. Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN, clarified that there was “no sign that this AWS outage was caused by a cyber attack.” Instead, he pointed to a “technical fault affecting one of Amazon’s main data centres,” explaining that such issues can occur “when systems become overloaded or a key part of the network goes down.”
The problem created a domino effect. Because so many applications are interlinked and dependent on AWS’s core services, a failure in one area quickly cascaded outward, leaving companies like the design platform Canva to report “significantly increased error rates” due to the “major issue with our underlying cloud provider.”
The Road to Recovery and Lingering Effects
AWS engineers worked tirelessly to stabilize the situation. The company’s status page showed a gradual return to normalcy. Just over an hour and a half after the initial alert, AWS announced that the issue had been “fully mitigated,” with most service operations “succeeding normally now.”
However, the fix wasn’t instantaneous for everyone. AWS noted that “some requests may be throttled” as systems worked through a backlog of traffic. This meant that even after the core problem was solved, some users continued to experience slow performance or errors as the digital world slowly got back up to speed.
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A Recurring Nightmare and a Call for Resilience
This incident is not an isolated one. It comes just months after the global CrowdStrike outage in July 2024, which grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, revealing the deep fragility of our interconnected technology systems.
These events are forcing businesses to confront a critical vulnerability. Jardin emphasized that the lesson extends beyond cybersecurity. “This incident is a reminder that cybersecurity isn’t only about defending against threats—it’s also about resilience,” he said. He urged companies to “plan for technical failures as seriously as they do for cyber attacks,” recommending strategies like redundancy, backup systems, and using multiple cloud providers to avoid having all their digital eggs in one basket.
As services flickered back to life on Monday, the episode left a lingering question in its wake. In our rush to embrace the convenience of the cloud, have we built a digital ecosystem that is efficient, yet dangerously fragile? The AWS outage was a temporary pause, but the conversation about building a more resilient internet is just beginning.
Author: Yasir Khan
Date: 20 Oct, 2025
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