AWS handles nearly a third of the planet's cloud infrastructure market, powering millions of apps and websites around the world / AFP

Popular internet services ranging from streaming platforms to messaging services to banking were offline for hours Monday due to an outage in Amazon's crucial cloud network, illustrating the extent to which internet life depends on the tech titan.

The disruption affected streaming platforms, including Amazon's Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat and Duolingo.

Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp were affected in Europe, according to Downdetector.

People also reported problems reaching websites including Amazon's own e-commerce shop.

Some banks such as Lloyd's were also impacted, and pointed to AWS as the problem.

Amazon said on an status page that the system at issue was back to "pre-event levels" and expected it would to take two hours to work through the data backlog caused by the problem.

Reports of problems with AWS plummeted at DownDetector but lingered.

A huge spike in disruption logged at Downdetector early Monday was followed by an even bigger jump some nine hours later, with the internet trouble tracker posting that it had received more than 11 million reports in total.

In an update, Amazon said "mitigations were applied to resolve launch failures", linking a "load balancer health" issue to the problem at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS handles nearly a third of the planet's cloud infrastructure market, powering millions of apps and websites around the world.

Its maintenance site said engineers scrambled to fix a DNS issue once they became aware at 0711 GMT of "increased error rates" hitting multiple services. It was resolved, but caused a huge backlog of stymied requests that had to be worked through.

More than 10 hours later, AWS was still working to get the cloud computing system running smoothly.

"The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," Amazon said in a status update.

The outage showed "how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet, for many of the online services we more or less take for granted," said financial analyst Michael Hewson.

"On an economic level it's almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket."

- Cloud leader -

AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud in third place. Businesses, governments and consumers around the world rely on their infrastructure for online activities.

The British government's websites were among those affected by Monday's outage, according to Downdetector, which relies on users to signal online problems they encounter.

"Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally," said Emarketer senior analyst Jacob Bourne.

"As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder."

In July 2024, another global online outage occurred when a US cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, issued a faulty update to its software used by airports, hospitals and many organizations.

According to Microsoft, some 8.5 million devices were affected, resulting in a systems crash and users being confronted with a "blue screen of death."

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