Key Points
- A massive, 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted hundreds of companies on Monday.
- Major services like Apple’s, McDonald’s, and Fortnite were all affected.
- The incident is a major blow to AWS’s reputation for reliability.
- The outage was caused by a database malfunction that led to a cascade of failures.
A massive, 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday caused chaos across the internet, disrupting the operations of hundreds of major companies, including Apple, McDonald’s, and the maker of Fortnite. The incident, which some are calling Amazon’s worst outage since 2021, is a stark reminder of how much of the modern world depends on a handful of giant cloud companies.
The outage struck at the heart of the cloud’s core promise: that a centralized, expertly-run system will be more reliable than what individual companies can manage on their own. For 15 hours on Monday, that promise was broken.
The timing is also bad for AWS. The cloud giant’s sales growth has been slowing, and it’s facing intense competition from rivals Microsoft and Google, who have been gaining ground with their new AI tools. While AWS is still the market leader, this high-profile failure is a major blow to its reputation for reliability.
The breakdown started with a malfunction in a key database service in northern Virginia, home to AWS’s largest cluster of data centers. This initial problem then caused a cascade of failures, as other systems that relied on that database also went down. Before long, hundreds of websites and apps were reporting problems.
While Amazon eventually restored all services, the incident is likely to fuel the growing trend of companies looking to “multi-cloud” strategies to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket.
