Monday morning got off to a chaotic start as a global internet outage linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) took down hundreds of websites and apps, including major services used by New Yorkers daily such as Venmo, Snapchat, McDonald’s, and Delta Air Lines.
The disruption began shortly after 3 am EST, when AWS–Amazon’s massive cloud computing network that powers much of the internet–experienced a failure in one of its main U.S. data centers.
By 7 am, reports of outages were flooding Downdetector.com, which tracks internet disruptions, with more than 6.5 million user reports worldwide and over 1 million in the U.S. alone.
By early afternoon, Amazon said it had “fully mitigated” the outage and was “seeing signs of recovery.”
However, some services continued to experience delays and connectivity issues. The company later admitted the problem stemmed from an internal monitoring system tied to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the virtual servers that allow thousands of companies to host their apps.
Amazon’s latest update (1:30 pm EST) confirmed that while operations were largely restored, residual disruptions were still affecting some services. It stated:
We are observing significant recovery across most AWS services. Some requests may continue to be throttled while we work through the backlog.
The incident temporarily broke much of the internet. Popular social platforms, payment systems, and streaming services were hit hardest, with some still recovering late Monday. Major platforms affected included:
- Canva
- Coinbase
- Delta Air Lines
- Discord
- Disney+
- DoorDash
- Duolingo
- Etsy
- Fortnite
- Gmail
- Google Maps
- Hulu
- McDonald’s App
- Netflix
- Prime Video
- Ring
- Robinhood
- Roblox
- Shopify
- Signal
- Snapchat
- Spotify
- TikTok
- United Airlines
- Venmo
- Wordle
- YouTube
Even government websites such as the UK’s Gov.uk and U.S. federal services like Medicare’s enrollment portal briefly went offline.
Tech experts called Monday’s event another wake-up call about the world’s growing dependence on a handful of companies that run the web’s infrastructure. Cybersecurity specialist Rimesh Patel stated:
This major outage underscores a stark reality: business operations associated with one critical vendor in a region can cascade into global instability.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, estimated the financial impact could reach hundreds of billions of dollars due to lost productivity, halted business operations, and travel disruptions.
How NYC Was Impacted
Across New York, commuters and workers reported glitches throughout the morning. Payments failed on Venmo, deliveries slowed on DoorDash, and some offices relying on Canva, Slack, or Zoom experienced disruptions.
Travelers at LaGuardia and JFK also reported minor delays linked to airline booking issues.
Though most services had returned online by early afternoon, Amazon’s status page warned that residual slowdowns could continue “for the rest of the day.”
The Bigger Picture
The outage follows a similar mass disruption in July 2024, when a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a global tech failure. This latest AWS event, though shorter, once again highlighted how even a single technical glitch can ripple across borders, banks, and homes.
As of Monday afternoon, AWS said full recovery was “well underway.”