Why the Internet Went Down: The AWS Outage Explained

Why Half the Internet Disappeared on Monday Morning

If your favorite games, social media apps, and even your smart home devices suddenly stopped working early Monday, you weren’t imagining things. A significant chunk of the internet went offline, and the cause was a single glitch at one of the most powerful companies in the world: Amazon.

The Simple Explanation: A Digital Landlord’s Bad Day

Think of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the invisible landlord for a massive part of the internet. Companies like Snapchat and Roblox rent their digital “space” from AWS to run their apps.

On Monday, a critical system inside one of Amazon’s biggest data centers failed. In simple terms, it was like the master address book for thousands of apps got corrupted, and services couldn’t find the data they needed to operate. The result was a widespread digital blackout.

Who Was Hit by the Outage?

The list of affected services shows just how interconnected our digital world is. Major platforms that went down included:

• 🎮 Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Clash of Clans, and Pokémon Go.
• 📱 Social & Communication: Snapchat and the secure messaging app Signal.
• 🏠 Work & Home: The design platform Canva, Ring smart cameras, and the crypto exchange Coinbase.

Is Everything Back to Normal?

Yes. Amazon’s engineers identified the problem and announced that services were “fully mitigated” within several hours. Apps and websites slowly flickered back online as the system stabilized. You may have noticed some lingering slowness as services worked to catch up on the backlog of requests.

The Big Takeaway: A Fragile Web

This outage is a stark reminder that the vast, sprawling internet is surprisingly dependent on just a handful of giant tech companies. A single failure point at a provider like AWS can cause a ripple effect that impacts millions of users globally. It highlights the trade-off between the convenience of the cloud and the risks of centralization.