Early this Monday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage in large scale, knocking out major websites and mobile apps worldwide. The disruption is rooted in a domain-name-system (DNS) error that prevented numerous services from resolving correctly, a fault that the company reported had been “fully mitigated”, though elevated error rates persisted.
The outage affected platforms spanning gaming, social media, financial services and healthcare. Users of apps such as Snapchat, Fortnite and Robinhood reported failures or interruptions. In the UK, institutions including Bank of Scotland, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and telecom providers experienced connectivity problems. According to Downdetector, millions of reports flooded in globally, underscoring the breadth of the disruption.
Services already began returning to normal. The company said its engineers were seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services after mitigating an internal network-load-balancer subsystem fault. That said, the recovery was described as uneven: while some services were fully back online, others remained impacted or exhibited intermittent performance.
Concentrated market
The incident has once again raised questions about the systemic risks of cloud-infrastructure concentration. AWS alone serves over one million active customers and spans more than 120 availability zones across 38 regions. Experts and the UK government pointed to the fact that the disruption affected financial-services players and government systems as evidence that cloud providers like AWS might warrant designations as “critical third-parties” subject to greater regulatory oversight.
For fintech firms, the outage is a potent reminder of underlying operational exposure: even those services not hosted directly on AWS but reliant on outsourced infrastructure or API-connectivity may face cascading effects. Recovery is underway, but the episode emphasizes the importance of resilience planning, cloud-vendor diversification and real-time monitoring of third-party dependencies. As AWS works through its backlog and elevated error rates, the industry will be watching closely for a full report and proof that similar outages can be prevented.