Amazon's Massive Outage Cripples the Internet, Even Local Schools Took a Hit Today

CLEVELAND 13 (WCTU) — A major disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) began at approximately 3:11am this morning, when the company reported elevated error rates and connectivity issues across multiple services in its US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia. AWS identified an internal DNS resolution problem as the root cause, which triggered cascading failures across load-balancers, APIs, and other critical systems.

By around 6:35am (EST), AWS said the core issue had been “fully mitigated,” although elevated error rates persisted across some services. Among the many impacted were Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, Venmo, Duolingo, Robinhood, and numerous banking and government platforms, including the UK’s Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, and HM Revenue & Customs.

"We couldn’t even use some of our school’s online programs and apps and didn’t even know they had anything to do with Amazon," said a student at Normandy High School in Parma, reflecting the broad and often unseen reliance on AWS infrastructure.

The incident exposed the fragility of digital systems heavily reliant on a small number of cloud providers. Despite being a regional fault centered on the US-EAST-1 data center, the disruption spread globally due to deeply integrated dependencies. AWS services like DynamoDB, essential for real-time data handling, were especially affected when endpoint resolution via DNS began to fail.

While AWS took mitigation steps, including throttling requests and restricting some internal services to reduce load during recovery, the company has not yet issued a full post-mortem. It did confirm that engineers worked in parallel on recovery paths and continues to recommend DNS cache flushing for users still experiencing resolution issues.

Experts emphasized that this outage was not the result of a cyberattack but an internal infrastructure failure. They warned that such events could become more impactful as more of the internet becomes concentrated in a handful of providers. The reliance on centralized services, even for unrelated platforms, reveals an invisible web of interconnected risks.

Calls for regulatory oversight have intensified in regions like the UK, where questions are being raised about AWS’s designation as a “critical third-party” provider in financial sectors. The incident has revived discussions on enforcing multi-region redundancy, developing multi-cloud strategies, and increasing transparency and resilience across essential digital services.

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