Amazon took down half the Internet (maybe even more).
Yes, you read that right. Amazon Web Services suffered a “small” blackout — and for a few hours… almost nothing was working. It was one of the biggest outages in recent years, and naturally, chaos followed!
WHO WAS AFFECTED
Let’s start with who got hit — and why it caused such a storm.
From Alexa to the McDonald’s app, and from Canva to Venmo, the most popular apps simply… froze. Even Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, T-Mobile, Coinbase, Asana, and many others were either malfunctioning or completely down.
It all started with a technical issue in US-EAST-1, AWS’s main data center in Virginia. At 3:11 a.m. U.S. time, AWS began experiencing major DNS issues with DynamoDB, one of the most critical databases in the cloud.
And what does that mean? Many apps couldn’t locate their databases — as if you had a file on your computer but the path to it was suddenly deleted.
Even Amazon’s own internal systems collapsed: driver apps, warehouse management, and Anytime Pay (which gives employees instant access to their wages) all went offline.
The problem quickly escalated, affecting more than 70 services.
According to Amazon ($AMZN), users were experiencing “increased error rates” and connectivity issues. Social media lit up with complaints, and even some UK government websites were affected.
By 5:30 a.m., Amazon reported “significant signs of recovery,” and by 1:30 p.m., the first substantial restorations were underway. By the afternoon, most systems were almost fully operational again.
STOCK PRICE RISE
So… all good then?
Actually, yes — and not only that, but Amazon’s stock ($AMZN) closed up +1.61% on the very same day!
How can AWS crash and the stock go up?
It’s possible — and it has happened before.
If we go back to December 2021, Amazon ($AMZN) had two major outages (on December 7 and 15).
The first one was so severe it even halted company shipments. Logistics, customer support, and even the Amazon.com site itself were affected.
And yet — the stock only dipped slightly and recovered within days, with no long-term impact whatsoever.
WHY INVESTORS DIDN’T PANIC
Investors know. They know that these disruptions are operational hiccups, not strategic threats.
AWS is the undisputed leader in cloud computing, controlling roughly 33% of the market — ahead of Microsoft and Google.
No matter how bad a few hours might look, no one seriously questions Amazon’s dominance in the long run.
The same thing has happened to others: when Microsoft went down, Google tried to lure away clients — yet there was no meaningful stock market reaction there either.
Investors bet on the long-term fundamentals, not on temporary downtimes.
Beyond that, Amazon has repeatedly proven it can manage crises exceptionally well.
Each time something breaks, it provides transparent updates, restores services quickly, and communicates clearly.
And since the entire world depends on its infrastructure, a simple AWS “sneeze” just reminds us how much we all rely on it.
So if you were worried — don’t be.
There’s no reason to.
Amazon remains one of the most reliable and powerful companies in the world.
Posted Using INLEO
This may be a bit unrelated but I've read almost half of the L1s in this space run on AWS. If that's true, then they're bound to experience outages such situations occur, depending on how entrenched their systems are on AWS.
And that increases their trustworthiness, transparency matters a lot.
A reminder of just how centralized the Internet has become. I don't really think that's a good thing.
I never even observed that. Anyway, I have taken the point out why their stock stayed green; 'market dominance'. Adding to that, investors are betting on the long term, this is something that glitches cannot offset.