Amazon AWS Outage Takes Down Half the Internet — Major Platforms Hit

Amazon’s AWS Goes Down, Takes Out “Half of the Internet”

A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted apps and websites worldwide, exposing how fragile the internet has become under the control of just a few cloud giants.

How the outage unfolded

Apps and services relying on Amazon Web Services were hit early this morning by a prolonged outage that crippled large portions of the global web. Platforms such as Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Fortnite, Venmo, Robinhood, and Chime all went dark — with over a thousand companies impacted across the US, UK, and beyond.

Even major institutions felt the ripple effect: airlines like United Airlines and Delta, telecom providers like T-Mobile and AT&T, and devices such as Amazon’s Ring cameras and Alexa assistants suffered connection failures.

“BREAKING: half of the internet is down,” one frustrated user posted. “Is there no alternative to AWS?”

The global impact

According to Newsweek, outage reports exceeded 1 million in the US and 800,000 in the UK, with countries like the Netherlands, Australia, France, and Japan each logging hundreds of thousands of cases. The failures originated in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia — an area known as “data center alley” for its dense concentration of server farms.

Most services recovered by Monday morning, but the damage was done: the outage revealed the vulnerability of an internet infrastructure heavily reliant on just two providers — Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud trails in a distant third.

Experts warn that such incidents highlight a single point of failure in modern digital systems — where the internet’s backbone depends on the uptime of a few corporate giants.

Centralization risk: too much power in too few hands

Critics argue that today’s internet has traded resilience for convenience. By consolidating infrastructure under a handful of providers, the tech world risks catastrophic disruption whenever one region falters. This is not merely a technical concern — it’s an issue of economic and national security.

“Really shows how easy it would be for Bezos or Ellison to just turn off the internet if they wanted to,” a user wrote — echoing concerns about corporate overreach and centralized control.

Why it matters

Cloud services power everything from banking and entertainment to logistics and healthcare. When a platform like AWS stumbles, the ripple effects reach into nearly every aspect of daily life. The incident serves as a wake-up call for businesses relying exclusively on one provider.

The AWS outage isn’t just a technical glitch — it’s a structural warning. The modern internet’s dependence on a few cloud giants makes it powerful yet dangerously brittle. Redundancy, decentralization, and transparent infrastructure investment are now urgent priorities.

Source: Associated Press, Newsweek, local reports, and global outage data. Article edited and optimized for clarity and SEO.

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