Sites and services across the internet have largely recovered following a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in the early hours of Monday morning that caused glitches internationally.

Websites such as Snapchat and Reddit were temporarily unavailable, while issues ere reported with British websites including Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, HMRC and Gov.uk.

In addition, many internet-connected devices ceased to work, including Ring doorbells and Amazon Alexa-enabled smart plugs that some people use to control home electrical devices, according to users.

Connected devices offline

Outage reports globally on Downdetector peaked at more than 6.5 million on Monday morning.

Some reported that work-related services such as the Slack messaging platform or the Zoom videoconferencing system were experiencing errors for a period of several hours.

A reader named Christina, who is unable to walk without crutches, told CNN that the Alexa-enabled smart plugs she used to control the lights and music in her room via voice control had ceased working.

The outage is the biggest internet-related disruption since a faulty CrowdStrike security update in July 2024 caused millions of Microsoft Windows systems to crash, creating chaos across airlines, hospitals, banks and other businesses.

Mehdi Daoudi, chief executive of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimated that the impact of the incident would reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, due to lost productivity and businesses being forced to halt or delay operations.

“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said in a statement to Silicon UK.

‘Significant’ errors

Other industry watchers said the incident showed how many companies had relied on a single cloud provider, increasing the chances for a major outage across the internet.

The largest cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft and Google, provide about 63 percent of all cloud services, according to figures from Synergy Research Group.

AWS confirmed on its status page that it was experiencing “significant” API errors and connectivity across multiple services in its US-EAST-1 cloud region hosted in northern Virginia.

It later said the issue was related to a load-monitoring system and that it was gradually resolving the problem.

The issue was first reported at 8:11 a.m. BST, with AWS initially saying it was experiencing DNS problems with its DynamoDB database service.

The company said at 11:35 a.m. BST that the DNS issue was “fully mitigated”, but another spike in user outage reports followed at around 5 p.m BST.

Amazon services disrupted

Amazon’s own services, including Amazon.com, AWS cloud services and the Alexa digital assistant, were affected by the problems, users said.

Amazon warehouse and delivery staff reported on social media that internal systems were offline at many sites, with some warehouse workers saying they were instructed to stand by in break rooms and loading areas during their shift to wait for systems to come back online.

Online games including Roblox and Fortnite experienced outages, as did online graphic design tool Canva and generative AI search offering Perplexity.

As of 8 p.m. BST, AWS said services were still degraded. It said it was mitigating launch failures for new EC2 instances, with decreasing network connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region, and was seeing significant improvements in Lambda invocation errors.