AWS cloud outage hits major airlines, large banks, popular steaming services and applications Monday morning due to a Domain Name System issue. ‘[AWS outages] are just going to continue to increase, especially as we see more AI capabilities being introduced into the enterprise,’ says Future Tech Enterprise CEO Bob Venero.
AWS experienced one of its largest outages in the early morning hours Monday that shut down a massive number of services—including its data service DynamoDB and EC2—as well as popular internet sites like Reddit and Snapchat, affecting well over 1,000 companies.
Bob Venero, CEO of Future Tech Enterprise, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., No. 76 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500 list, said he is seeing a “tremendous” amount of public cloud repatriation to colocation and on-premises as customers get more savvy about the risks associated with the public cloud.
Venero predicted there will be increased outages going forward with increased AI usage.
“There are going to be more and more of them,” he said. “They are just going to continue to increase, especially as we see more AI capabilities being introduced into the enterprise.”
[Related: AWS Hires Former DataStax CEO, Google VP To Boost AI Security]
AWS, the $124 billion Seattle-based cloud company, is pouring billions of dollars into building new AI-focused data centers across the world that will be filled with AI infrastructure that power AWS services.
For example, just in 2025, AWS committed to spending $20 billion to ramp up its AI-focused data center infrastructure in Pennsylvania, as well as $11 billion in Georgia.
AWS is the largest cloud company on the planet. The company owns 30 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share, then Google Cloud at 13 percent share as of the second quarter of 2025, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
“It’s up to the customer to decide how much risk they want,” said Venero. “That is why we believe in on-prem and colocation that can avoid some of the risk associated with being in the hyperscaler public clouds.”
AWS Outage Hits Airlines, Steaming Providers And More
AWS’ blackout Monday affected large airlines, banks, media, applications and websites, including cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, streaming services Disney+ and Hulu, and AI star Perplexity all reporting disruptions.
AWS’ internet outage also affected popular social media providers like Snapchat as well as popular online sites like Reddit and designer platform provider Canva.
Airlines such as Delta Air Lines and United Airlines also reported disruptions, according to Downdetector.com.
Large banks, including U.K.-based Lloyds Banking Group, were impacted by AWS’ outage with clients being unable to access services.
The list of popular gaming, food, technology and streaming services that have been affected continues to grow, but include Amazon Alexa, Apple Music, Duolingo, Fortnite, HBO Max, Lyft, McDonald’s, Ring, Roku, Slack, Starbucks, Venmo, Xbox and Zoom.
“Most of the impact was due to third-party services that also use AWS services,” said Ethan Simmons, a managing partner at Pinnacle Technology Partners, an AWS managed service provider, in a text message to CRN. “If this had happened during U.S. business hours, this would have been a bigger story.”
“Due to the timing of the events” the impact on PTP’s clients was “minimal,” Simmons said.
PTP, which has an impressive life sciences customer base, said it is working with customers to get them to follow the “best practices” in AWS’ Well-Architected Framework.
“One of the framework’s pillars is reliability,” he said. “To maximize uptime, you still need to be smart about how you deploy solutions in the cloud. Incidents like this always make headlines, but AWS still provides better uptime and offers resilient design options that most companies cannot afford to build themselves.”
According to multiple news outlets, over 1,000 companies across the globe were impacted by the AWS outage.
DNS Issue ‘Fully Mitigated’
AWS has identified the issue as a Domain Name System (DNS) issue but has yet to identify the cause of the DNS error that led to the outages.
“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” AWS said in a statement Monday morning.
“Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda,” AWS said.
Although most operations have recovered as of around 9:30 a.m. ET, AWS said some regions may still experience increased error rates. The company is asking these customers to clear caches via their browser settings.
AWS Outage Timeline
The distribution began hitting applications and websites around 3:00 a.m. EST.
Downdetector reported Monday that users “indicated issues” at AWS in US-East-1 region. “These problems are impacting multiple services that depend on AWS infrastructure,” said Downdetector in a post on its website. “We’re monitoring the situation: check your local Downdetector site for the latest updates.”
Among the sites that users indicated problems in the wake of the AWS outage were Amazon, Snapchat, Chime, Starbucks, Blink Security, Life 360 and Roblox.
AWS confirmed the issues in an AWS Health Dashboard post at 3:51 a.m. EST.
“We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” said AWS. “This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”
AWS Outage Sees 50,000 Downdetector Reports
As of 5:22 a.m. EST, AWS said it was “observing early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS services” after applying initial mitigations.
“During this time, requests may continue to fail as we work toward full resolution. We recommend customers retry failed requests,” said AWS.
Reports on Downdetector reached massive heights of around 50,000 reports of outages due to AWS.
AWS reported increased error rates and latencies as of 7:48 a.m. EST on its AWS Health Dashboard.
“We continue to work to fully restore new EC2 launches in US-EAST-1,” said AWS in the health dashboard post. “We recommend EC2 Instance launches that are not targeted to a specific Availability Zone (AZ) so that EC2 has flexibility in selecting the appropriate AZ.
AWS said the “impairment in new EC2 launches” also affects services such as RDS, ECS and Glue. “We also recommend that Auto Scaling Groups are configured to use multiple AZs so that Auto Scaling can manage EC2 instance launches automatically,” said AWS.
By around 6:30 a.m.ET, AWS said it solved the DNS issue and was requesting companies dump their temporary storage files to help speed up the restoration of its services.
AWS AI Push Will Increase Outages
Venero said 70 percent of his Fortune 500 customers are looking at colocation versus their on-premises data center as a result of security, risk and power consumption concerns.
“Colos become very important because most company data centers don’t have the power they need for the consumption of a lot of the new systems, especially those tied to AI and GPUs,” he said.
Venero is reaching out to his customers in the wake of the outage. “This is out of control of the customer,” he said. “You don’t have the ability to fix it. It is in somebody else’s hands. Are you OK with that risk? If so, you continue. If not, you repatriate.”
Amazon is set to report the results of its fiscal third-quarter 2025 later this month.
