Global AWS Outage Disrupts Snapchat, Reddit, and Major Apps Worldwide

Experts warn: Overdependence on cloud giants exposes systemic fragility

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, suffered a major global outage on Monday, paralyzing thousands of websites and disrupting popular apps including Snapchat, Reddit, Coinbase, Robinhood, Signal, Lyft, and Fortnite.
The incident marks one of the largest internet disruptions since last year’s CrowdStrike system failure, which temporarily crippled hospitals, airports, and banks across multiple countries.

🔧 Gradual Recovery After Three-Hour Outage

After nearly three hours of downtime, services began to recover by 6 a.m. Eastern Time.
AWS said on its status page that “most requests are now being processed successfully, though backlogs are still being cleared.”

Cybersecurity engineer and IET Fellow Junade Ali noted that the issue appeared to stem from AWS’s network system managing database products. “Such problems can usually be contained and resolved within hours unless deeper infrastructure faults emerge,” he explained.

🌍 Global Ripple Effect

AWS underpins much of the world’s digital infrastructure, offering on-demand computing and storage services for businesses, governments, and individuals. As one of the “Big Three” cloud providers alongside Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, even brief outages can cascade worldwide.

According to monitoring firm Downdetector (via Ookla), over 4 million users reported connectivity issues:

• Snapchat peaked at over 22,000 outage reports.

• Reddit, Roblox, Coinbase, Robinhood, Chime, Signal, and Perplexity AI were all impacted.

• Amazon’s own platforms, including Prime Video, Alexa, and its retail site, faced disruptions.

• In the UK, Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website were also affected.

⚠ Experts Highlight Internet Fragility

“This outage underscores how fragile our hyper-connected world has become,” said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Computer Science at the University of Surrey.
“With only a handful of companies controlling the backbone of the internet, any single point of failure can create global chaos.”

Patrick Burgess of the British Computer Society added: “The internet has become like electricity — fundamental to daily life. When a core cloud provider like AWS goes down, users see apps fail but rarely realize the problem lies deep in the cloud.”

Experts stressed there’s no indication of a cyberattack behind the incident. “This looks like a technical malfunction rather than a targeted breach,” Burgess said.
Rafe Pilling, Director of Threat Intelligence at Sophos, echoed that sentiment, noting that AWS’s scale means even small disruptions can trigger far-reaching consequences.

“Every major outage reminds us of the same truth — the cloud has made the world more connected, but also more fragile,” Pilling concluded.