Seattle( The COW News Digital)A massive technical failure in Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the world’s largest cloud computing platform — caused widespread disruptions on Monday, knocking hundreds of major websites and online services offline and affecting millions of users globally.
According to international media reports, the outage originated from an internal issue within AWS’s network load balancing system, a key component responsible for managing traffic distribution across servers. The disruption quickly cascaded across regions, paralyzing digital infrastructure relied upon by businesses, governments, and consumers worldwide.
Several prominent online platforms — including ChatGPT, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Signal, and Duolingo — were among the services that reported significant performance issues or complete downtime.
Data from DownDetector, a website that tracks internet outages, indicated that over 1,000 companies across various sectors were impacted. The majority of complaints came from users in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, though service interruptions were reported in dozens of other countries as well.
Experts described the AWS outage as one of the largest and most disruptive cloud failures in recent years, highlighting the world’s increasing dependence on centralized digital infrastructure. “When AWS goes down, the internet feels it,” said a cybersecurity analyst, adding that the ripple effect underscores the risks of cloud concentration.
Major e-commerce websites, gaming platforms, and enterprise services relying on AWS’s cloud infrastructure experienced temporary shutdowns, delayed transactions, and disrupted communication systems. Many organizations issued public apologies to customers, citing the Amazon cloud issue as the root cause of their downtime.
In an official statement, Amazon confirmed the technical issue and said that engineers had “identified and resolved the primary cause” of the failure. However, the company admitted that “some residual service disruptions” were still being observed as restoration efforts continued.
“Our teams are actively monitoring the systems to ensure full recovery,” Amazon said, adding that system restoration would proceed region by region.
Technology analysts say this latest failure could reignite global debates about cloud dependency, redundancy, and data resilience, particularly as AWS powers a significant share of the world’s internet backbone.
For now, most major platforms have resumed normal operations, though experts warn that intermittent instability may persist for several hours.
