Amazon Web Services Outage Knocks Major Websites Offline — Disney+, Reddit, McDonald's App, United Airlines Among Those Hit

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Amazon Web Services confirmed a widespread operational disruption on Monday that caused increased error rates and latency across multiple cloud services in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region — the company's largest and most critical data hub.At 12:11 a.m. PDT, AWS engineers began investigating the elevated error rates and latency affecting numerous services, including EC2, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, ECS, and Glue.Within an hour, the company confirmed the issue stemmed from DNS resolution failures in DynamoDB's API endpoint, which impacted many dependent systems and global services such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global Tables.Also Read: Amazon’s AWS CEO Teases Major AI AdvancementsBy 2:22 a.m. PDT, AWS had applied initial mitigations and began seeing "early signs of recovery." Customers were advised to retry failed requests as AWS worked to clear service backlogs.At 3:35 a.m., AWS announced that it had fully mitigated the DNS issue, restoring most service operations to normal. However, new EC2 instance launches in some availability zones continued to face capacity-related errors as the company implemented additional recovery measures.Between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., AWS progressively restored full functionality across all impacted zones. Engineers re-enabled new EC2 instance launches, processed backlogs for EventBridge and CloudTrail, and normalized Lambda SQS event mapping.The company advised customers to launch new EC2 instances without targeting a specific availability zone to allow AWS to select available capacity automatically. By 5:48 a.m. PDT, AWS confirmed steady progress and reported that "most requests are now succeeding."The service interruption affected more than 70 AWS products and disrupted several major websites and applications globally. AWS stated that the issue was operational — not security-related — and that its engineering teams worked on "multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery."The outage rippled across industries, temporarily knocking out access to Amazon, Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) Disney+, Lyft Inc (NASDAQ:LYFT), McDonald Corporation (NYSE:MCD) app, New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT), Reddit Inc (NYSE:RDDT), Ring, Robinhood Markets, Inc (NASDAQ:HOOD), Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) Snapchat, T-Mobile US, Inc (NASDAQ:TMUS), United Airlines Holdings, Inc (NASDAQ:UAL), Venmo, and Verizon Communications Inc (NYSE:VZ), according to Downdetector, CNBC reported.British government websites, including Gov.uk and HM Revenue and Customs, also went offline.Lloyds Banking Group confirmed service interruptions.Airline passengers with United and Delta Air Lines, Inc (NYSE:DAL) also reported difficulties checking in or accessing reservations.Cloud-based platforms like Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX), Fortnite, Coinbase Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:COIN), Canva, and Perplexity AI all reported disruptions.Price Action: AMZN stock is up 0.69% at $214.47 at last check on Monday. Amazon’s Powerful AWS Custom Chip To Get An Upgrade – Why Is It Important? Photo: Shutterstock