AWS Outage Briefly Shutters Major Platforms
- Staff Writer
- 17 hours ago
- 1 min read
Early Monday morning, millions of users woke up to find much of the internet down. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud infrastructure provider, experienced a major outage that rippled across industries, from fintech to airlines to fast food apps.
The disruption, which began around 3 a.m. Eastern, affected major platforms including Facebook, Robinhood, Venmo, Reddit, Lyft, United Airlines, The New York Times, and even McDonald’s mobile app. By 5:30 a.m., AWS reported that systems were recovering, attributing the issue to a DNS problem tied to its DynamoDB database system used by countless websites for data storage and computing power.
What Happened
AWS engineers identified increased latency and error rates across multiple U.S. East data centers, especially in Northern Virginia, home to some of Amazon’s most critical infrastructure.
The company confirmed that the underlying DNS issue was mitigated within hours, though some throttling persisted during recovery.
AWS later said operations had returned to near normal as engineers continued to trace the root cause.
Why This Matters
The incident underscored just how interconnected today’s digital economy has become. AWS powers millions of business-critical applications, from fintech systems and payment gateways to logistics software and SMB lender portals. When AWS goes down, so does much of the infrastructure behind eCommerce, payments, and lending.
Outages like this serve as a reminder for fintechs and lenders that cloud dependency is a double-edged sword: it enables incredible scalability and cost efficiency, but also creates systemic points of failure when a major provider experiences downtime.
