(MENAFN) A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday triggered widespread disruption across the internet, taking down or slowing a range of popular websites and online services that rely on the company’s cloud infrastructure. The incident affected everything from streaming platforms and banking apps to communication networks and news outlets, highlighting once again the world’s heavy dependence on a few dominant cloud providers.

The disruption was felt by millions of users as major platforms — including Amazon’s own retail site, Disney+, Lloyds Bank, Lyft, The New York Times, Reddit, and Zoom — reported difficulties or complete service outages. Many customers were unable to log in, make payments, or access content during the several-hour disruption.

AWS, which powers a large share of the world’s internet services, confirmed that it was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple systems. The company said engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery” and later reported “significant” progress in restoring normal operations.

According to the company, the source of the disruption was isolated to a specific region of its network serving the US East Coast, where many of its largest data centers are located.

However, AWS did not immediately specify what caused the malfunction or why the problem spread so widely across dependent platforms.

The US East region of AWS, which hosts thousands of business clients and high-traffic platforms, has experienced similar technical problems in the past. Even short outages there can ripple globally due to how integrated AWS is within the digital infrastructure that supports banking, e-commerce, logistics, and streaming services.

The latest incident comes amid rising scrutiny of the world’s reliance on a small number of cloud computing providers — primarily Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — that collectively power much of the modern internet. Outages involving these firms can have far-reaching consequences, from halting business operations to disrupting access to essential online services.

While Monday’s issue was unrelated to the July 2024 global IT meltdown, the memory of that crisis remains fresh. That earlier outage, triggered by a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, caused widespread crashes of Microsoft Windows systems, grounding flights, paralyzing hospitals, and disrupting financial networks worldwide.

AWS’s latest service disruption once again underscores the fragility of the digital systems that underpin modern life. For many businesses, the outage served as a reminder of the risks of depending too heavily on a single cloud provider — and of how swiftly a technical failure in one region can reverberate around the globe.

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