On what was supposed to be a day full of lights, AWS decided to celebrate Diwali its own way, by turning off the lights across the internet.
A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday brought large parts of the internet to a halt, affecting everything from social media and entertainment apps to banking and aviation systems.
What Happened:
The issue began early Monday morning, around 12:40 PM IST, when AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, its oldest and most critical hub, started experiencing “significant error rates and latencies.” Amazon later confirmed the fault originated from a DNS failure following a technical update to DynamoDB, a vital database service that powers countless applications worldwide.
The DNS glitch prevented apps from finding the correct servers as the address book broke down. Also, the DynamoDB went offline, and other core AWS systems like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Network Load Balancer also began to fail, causing widespread service interruptions.
What was Impacted:
According to Downdetector, the outage affected 113 AWS services, which impacted over 11 million user reports globally.
In the United Kingdom, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, HMRC, and several government portals went offline.
In India, major disruptions were faced by the aviation sector, which caused airlines to revert to manual systems, leading to hundreds of flight delays and several cancellations. The Reserve Bank of India confirmed that about ten banks and NBFCs experienced temporary disruptions, which were resolved later in the day.
The outage affected some of the world’s most widely used digital services — including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo, Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Signal, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Disney+, Prime Video, Alexa, and even Amazon.com itself.
Amazon’s Response:
Around 12:40 PM IST, AWS engineers began mitigation efforts shortly after the problem was detected and at 4:23 AM IST on Tuesday, AWS officially declared that “all services have returned to normal operations,” with only minor residual delays in a few subsystems like AWS Config and Redshift.
Overall view:
This incident is one of the largest internet outages since the CrowdStrike debacle of 2024, showcasing the major reliance on centralised cloud providers, where a single technical error can disrupt global communication, commerce, and infrastructure.
From social media scrolls to online payments and even flight systems, the outage reminded us that when the cloud sneezes, the whole internet catches a cold.
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