Amazon outage reveals digital fragility

Internet services around the globe were disrupted on Monday as Amazon Web Services battled severe outages, affecting everything from financial and government websites to airlines and gaming platforms.

The disruptions, which began early in the morning, were mostly resolved by the afternoon, Amazon said, with the company adding in the early evening that its web services had "returned to normal operations".

"The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work," Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, told CNN. He estimated the damages could reach billions of dollars.

Outage monitoring company DownDetector said it was aware of about 9,300 users who were affected globally.

Several websites for major companies, including Facebook, Snapchat, Delta Air Lines, McDonald's and Robinhood experienced outages.

The outage prompted some concern in Europe over its reliance on technology based in the United States.

Several UK government sites were affected, causing their revenue and customs services to be unavailable for a period of time, as were Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and the telecom company Vodafone.

"Europe's dependency on monopoly cloud companies like Amazon is a security vulnerability and an economic threat we can't ignore," Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, told Politico.

Ulrike Franke, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, posted on Bluesky: "My robot vacuum cleaner no longer works and can someone explain why a robot in Paris is linked to US East? Talk about European digital sovereignty."

Amazon Web Services is the largest provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for 37 percent of the global market.

"When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it. Media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles," said Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital for the nongovernmental organization Article 19.

"This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold," Mike Chapple, a former computer scientist with the National Security Agency of the US, said in a statement.