An Amazon DNS outage takes much of the Internet out

The outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) took out vast swaths of the web, including websites, banks and some government services.

Amazon said Monday morning that the outage had been “fully mitigated” and that most services were returning to normal after a long period of being unable to load much of the internet.

The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the US East Coast, on DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so customer applications and websites can load.

While some errors can be resolved quickly, DNS issues can sometimes take longer to resolve.

Many major applications were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal and Zoom have faced extended outages, as have Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance product.

Millions of businesses and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, applications, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to own at least 30% of the total cloud market.

Amazon did not give a reason for the outage.

Before that, the last global internet outage was in 2024, when cybersecurity giant Crowdstrike deployed an update to its anti-malware engine, crashing millions of computers around the world and leading to airport delays and mass power outages. Systems globally took several days to return to normal.

Before that, a glitch with DNS provider Akamai in 2021 caused some of the world’s largest websites to go offline for several hours, including FedEx, Steam, and PlayStation Network.