The Cloud Sneezed. The Internet Caught Pneumonia

When the internet hiccups, it’s usually Amazon that sneezes. On Monday, a small internal failure inside Amazon Web Services rippled into one of the largest global outages in recent memory—reminding everyone just how dependent the modern world has become on one company’s cloud.

From Reddit to Venmo, from Uber to Fortnite, thousands of websites and apps blinked out for hours because a single AWS region in northern Virginia forgot how to route network traffic.

What started as a technical blip almost became a digital blackout.

How One AWS Region Took Down Half The Web

The disruption began inside US-EAST-1, the data center cluster that serves as the default home for much of the internet.

A malfunction in a network health-monitoring subsystem within Amazon’s EC2 service triggered DNS failures. Those breakdowns prevented apps from finding the right servers to reach critical databases like DynamoDB.

Amazon said all services were back online by late afternoon, though lingering backlogs continued for hours in systems such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect.

The company confirmed the problem originated in its internal network but offered few details on why the same region has failed multiple times in recent years.

From Snapchat To Banks To Government Services: The Ripple Effect

The outage hit nearly every corner of the digital world. Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Duolingo, Coinbase, Robinhood, and Lyft all went dark, along with Amazon’s own Prime Video and Alexa.

In the U.K., government services, banks, and telecom providers reported downtime. Downdetector logged more than 4 million user complaints worldwide.

“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X, renewing calls to rein in Big Tech’s dominance.

The Fragile Backbone Of The Cloud

Amazon Web Services isn’t just another vendor—it’s the backbone of the connected economy, hosting data and applications for governments, hospitals, banks, and startups alike.

Monday’s outage, the third major AWS failure linked to the same region in five years, shows how one glitch in a massive shared infrastructure can ripple through everyday life.

When Cloud Becomes The Single Point Of Failure

The lesson is clear: convenience has a cost. The cloud may feel infinite, but it lives in real machines that can—and do—break.

Until businesses diversify beyond a handful of megaproviders, even a small AWS glitch can turn into a giant mess for mankind.

That's all for this week! If you found these updates useful, you'll like more from this newsletter. Get deeper dives, hot takes, and all the latest tech news delivered straight to your inbox.