AWS Down: The Billion-Dollar Impact of Cloud Dependency

Amazon says its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is experiencing a wide array of websites and apps, with millions of users facing disruption.

“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS says in a statement. “This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. 

“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. 

“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”

AWS outage: What’s happening?

Disruption at Amazon's North Virginia data centres is affecting core services including DynamoDB and EC2: the database and computing foundations that thousands of companies rent to power their applications. 

When these foundational services fail, it creates an immediate and widespread ripple effect, impacting everything from gaming platforms to banking applications.

This outage serves as yet another stark reminder of a cloud computing reality: the infrastructure behind digital services are far more fragile than most users realise. 

A recurring outage pattern

This is not the first time an AWS outage has caused catastrophic disruption.

The cloud giant has been at the centre of numerous major outages – in 2012 alone, AWS suffered multiple disruptions, including a 20-hour Christmas Eve outage that caused a partial Netflix streaming outage that ran into Christmas Day.

A similarly-timed outage hit AWS in December 2021, causing chaos for Amazon customers doing last-minute shopping for the festive period.

And, last June, an incident at AWS affected major organisations including The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, with a problem with AWS Lambda leading to increased error rates across multiple AWS services.

This shows that even the most sophisticated infrastructure at the industry’s biggest names remain susceptible to failure.

Similar has been seen at Microsoft Azure, too. 

In January 2023, a Microsoft Azure outage wiped out Teams, 365 and Outlook thanks to network issues. It also faced a ‘leap year’ bug in 2012 as flawed date-handling logic caused by a coding error prevented it from generating new security certificates on 29 February, instead jumping to 29 February 2013 — a date that does not exist.

Another July 2025 Outlook outage lasted 19 hours, leaving millions unable to access email – showcasing how downtime costs encompass more than just inconvenience as, in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, such disruptions can compromise audit trails and jeopardise compliance standards.

“When one of the major cloud platforms goes down, it reminds everyone how interconnected modern business systems have become,” says George Foley, Technical Advisor at ESET Ireland, a subsidiary of global software company ESET, of AWS’ ongoing outage.

“Even if your own website or app isn’t hosted on AWS, there’s a good chance something you use from your CRM to your payment processor is. 

“Outages like this highlight the importance of having resilience plans in place, including backups and alternative routes for essential data and services.”

The business impact of internet outages

Internet disruptions inflict billions of dollars in annual losses through subsequent impacts on revenue streams, slumps in productivity and damaged reputation. 

Major worldwide outages have individually been known to exceed a billion dollars in costs, while mid-sized enterprises can lose thousands each minute their systems are down. 

And with 76% of global respondents to a 2024 survey reportedly running applications on AWS and 48% of developers using its services – alongside the fact it powers more than 90% of Fortune 100 companies – the question isn’t whether outages will occur, it’s about the impact of them when they eventually do.