Amazon Web Services returns to normal operation as outage hits Snapchat

Amazon.com cloud service returned to normal operations on Monday afternoon, as per AWS, after an internet outage that caused global turbulence. The outage hampered thousands of sites, including some of the internet’s most popular apps, like Snapchat and Reddit.

Various banks, such as Lloyds and Halifax, were impacted by the issue. Amazon said some AWS services had a backlog of messages that may take a few hours to process. 

The platform outage monitor Down detector stated that users reported the outage issue globally, including 11 million on Monday. 

Prof Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said, “What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is”.

Prof Alan further added that various online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this reveals that problems can occur in even the massive number of third-party providers.

He said, “Small errors, often human-made, can have widespread and significant impact”.


The Amazon outage issue began at around 07:00 BST on Monday, and the users started facing problems accessing a slew of platforms. The problem impacted a range of different sites and services, including online games like Fortnite, to the language learning app Duolingo.

Amazon has yet not provide the full details of the cause of Monday’s outage and has not published any official statement regarding this. Amazon said on its update that the issue to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB APi endpoint in US East-1.


 DNS, Domain Name System, is often linked to a phone book for the internet.

On Monday morning, Snapchat users have reported why is Snapchat not working, leaving the social media platform unresponsive for millions. Users were unable to log in, load, or send any message.

Outages like Monday occur frequently, but not on a similar scale as it is. 

The Head of the Future of Technology Institute, Cori Crider, told the BBC that the incident was a bit like a bridge collapsing. She said that an essential part of the economy has fallen to pieces. 

She further added that, with so much of cloud computing relying on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, estimated at around 70%, the status quo is unsustainable. 

She said, “Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this fall over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it”.

The problem highlights how everyday digital services are connected and their reliance on a small number of global cloud services. 

The global cybersecurity advisor at European Cybersecurity firm, Jake Moore, said that this outage once again highlights the dependency they have on relatively fragile infrastructure.