A widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday temporarily took down several major global apps and digital platforms, including Perplexity AI, Canva, Snapchat, Robinhood, and multiple enterprise services, highlighting the internet’s deep reliance on a handful of cloud providers.
The disruption began around 8:45 p.m. IST (10:15 a.m. ET), affecting regions across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. The outage lasted for nearly two hours before Amazon began gradually restoring connectivity to affected services. According to monitoring platform Downdetector, reports of website and app failures spiked rapidly during the period, with thousands of users flagging access issues on multiple platforms.
AWS confirmed the outage in an update on its Service Health Dashboard, citing “a networking configuration error” as the cause that disrupted connectivity across several data centers. The company stated that its engineering teams “identified and resolved the issue” and that systems were “fully recovered” within hours.
The incident impacted some of the most widely used digital products. Canva users were unable to access design templates or save ongoing projects, while Snapchat users reported problems sending messages and loading filters. Perplexity AI, the rising conversational AI platform, went temporarily offline for users in multiple countries. Meanwhile, Robinhood faced login errors, affecting trading activity during U.S. market hours.
This marks one of the most significant AWS outages of 2025, reigniting concerns over the world’s growing dependence on centralized cloud infrastructure. AWS, Amazon’s cloud division, powers a large portion of the internet — from social media and streaming services to enterprise software and AI platforms.
In a statement, an AWS spokesperson said, “We experienced an issue impacting a small subset of our network infrastructure in the US-East-1 region. The root cause was identified and remediated. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to customers and are reviewing safeguards to prevent recurrence.”
The US-East-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, is one of AWS’s largest and most active hubs, supporting a majority of its global customers. Over the years, outages in this region have led to disruptions across major internet services worldwide, given how many companies rely on it for primary workloads.
Industry Reaction and Impact
The outage drew widespread reaction across the technology community, with many emphasizing the need for multi-cloud strategies and infrastructure diversification to reduce the risks of single-provider dependency.
Cloud computing expert Vijay Sharma, a senior technology analyst at CloudTech Research, said, “The AWS incident underscores the fragility of the global internet ecosystem. When a single region goes down, it cascades across multiple dependent services. Enterprises need to invest in multi-region redundancy and consider hybrid cloud solutions.”
In the financial sector, Robinhood’s temporary downtime sparked frustration among traders during active trading hours. A spokesperson for the company said services were restored “as soon as AWS resolved the root issue,” and confirmed that no customer data was compromised.
AI-driven platforms such as Perplexity AI and ChatGPT-based integrations were also affected, as many AI models rely on AWS-hosted APIs for real-time inference. Several users took to social media to report disruptions in generative AI applications, highlighting the extent of cloud interconnectivity within emerging AI ecosystems.
Economic and Operational Consequences
While the exact financial impact of the outage remains unclear, technology analysts estimate that large-scale disruptions of this kind can cost companies millions in lost productivity and customer trust. According to Gartner, global downtime of a top-tier cloud provider can cause up to $150 million in losses per hour when factoring in e-commerce, enterprise SaaS, and digital advertising operations.
For Amazon, which earns over $90 billion annually from its cloud division, ensuring reliability is critical. AWS has historically maintained a strong uptime record, but as cloud dependency deepens, even short-term interruptions are increasingly disruptive.
Growing Debate on Cloud Centralization
The incident has reignited debate around the concentration of cloud services among a few tech giants — primarily AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — that collectively manage over 65 percent of global cloud infrastructure.
Cybersecurity and policy experts argue that this concentration presents systemic risks, especially as more government and enterprise systems move to cloud environments. “Cloud centralization has made the internet more efficient but also more vulnerable,” said Dr. Priya Deshmukh, a digital governance researcher. “Outages like this show how a single failure can impact global operations, from social media to healthcare.”
Calls for diversified cloud architectures and open-source alternatives have been gaining momentum as organizations reassess their risk mitigation strategies. Startups in the distributed cloud and edge computing space have also seen increased investor interest, as companies seek backup systems independent of centralized providers.
Restoration and Future Measures
By late Monday night, AWS confirmed that all major services had been restored, and most customer applications were operating normally. The company said it is conducting a post-incident review to strengthen its failover mechanisms and improve communication during service disruptions.
Experts say that cloud providers will need to move toward more distributed and transparent system architectures to ensure resilience. With the rise of AI-driven services, dependency on real-time cloud computation is expected to grow, making such incidents even more consequential.
Despite the brief disruption, analysts expect no long-term damage to AWS’s market position. The company continues to hold the largest global market share in cloud computing, with more than one-third of all workloads running on its infrastructure. However, the outage serves as a reminder of the critical infrastructure role AWS plays — and the cascading effects when it falters.
The episode has also renewed focus on the importance of backup systems and regional distribution in AI-driven business environments. For enterprises and users alike, it underscores a single point: in the digital age, even a few minutes of downtime can ripple across industries worldwide.