Amazon Cloud Glitch Sends Snapchat and Banks Offline—Services Bounce Back!

On Monday, a major outage at Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, caused widespread disruptions across the internet. Many well-known websites and apps, including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, and several banks like Lloyds and Halifax, were knocked offline for hours. AWS is a cloud computing company that provides the technology and infrastructure for thousands of other businesses to operate online. When AWS experienced problems, more than 1,000 apps and websites were affected, leaving millions of users unable to access their favorite services.

The outage began around 7:00 in the morning, and reports of issues quickly flooded in from all over the world. Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, said it received more than 6. 5 million reports from users during the incident. The problems impacted a wide range of services, from popular online games like Fortnite to educational apps such as Duolingo. Even banks struggled to recover as the outage continued. By midday, Amazon announced that most of its affected services had been restored, but the event highlighted how much the internet relies on a few large companies to keep things running smoothly.

Experts say the outage was related to DNS, or Domain Name System, which acts like a phone book for the internet by translating website names into numbers that computers can understand. When DNS fails, browsers cannot find the websites people are looking for. Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey explained that many online services depend on third-party providers for their infrastructure, and even small errors can have a huge impact. Other experts, like Cori Crider from the Future of Technology Institute, warned that relying on just a few big companies for cloud computing is risky. She suggested that using more local services could make the internet safer and more reliable. The outage serves as a reminder of how interconnected and fragile our digital world can be.