Name: How one Amazon outage can break the internet
Uploaded: 2025-10-23T20:09:52.590Z
Duration: 3 min 49 s
Description: Snapchat down. Fortnite offline. Banking apps frozen. A technical glitch at Amazon Web Services caused global chaos. Here’s what you need to know.

Snapchat down. Fortnite offline. Banking apps frozen. A technical glitch at Amazon Web Services caused global chaos. Here’s what you need to know.

A recent outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruptions, impacting over a thousand online services including messaging apps, games, and payment platforms. AWS, along with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, supports about 60% of all online services, making them critical to the functioning of the internet.

While using these major providers offers benefits such as redundancy, scalability, and compliance with local laws, the concentration of power also introduces significant risks. In response, regions like the EU and India are investing in independent infrastructure to reduce reliance on US tech giants. Experts suggest that international cooperation is needed to create a more robust and resilient global internet.

How one Amazon outage can break the internet

Snapchat, Signal and Slack glitching? Games like Roblox and Fortnite totally down. Even payment apps like Venmo and crypto platforms like Coinbase froze. These are just a few examples of more than a thousand online services that were affected by the recent AWS outage. AWS runs a massive part of the internet, about one third of all cloud services worldwide. And together with Microsoft, Azure and Google Cloud, the three US tech giants supply the infrastructure for 60% of all online services, giving them a lot of control. So what does it mean for us users when one of them crashes? And are there any real alternatives out there? Let's break it down. Amazon, Google and Microsoft run the backbone of the web. They host your favourite apps, store massive amounts of data and keep businesses online. How? By running huge networks of data centres all around the world. That's great for companies because they don't need to build their own infrastructure. That would take very long and be too expensive, especially if you're a small startup trying to grow. So companies instead rent servers from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. That way they are online immediately. But that kind of concentrated power can be risky. Cloud computing infrastructure is very complex. One technical glitch in a core structure can have devastating consequences for everything connected to it. The AWS outage proved this. Streaming services, banking, even smart homes went dark. All because of one single data centre failure in the US. So what actually happened? In simple terms, AWS failed to direct people to websites and services they were trying to reach for several hours. However, using the infrastructure of big providers does have a lot of upsides for companies. If one data centre goes down, traffic can quickly shift to another one nearby. It means your favourite apps stay online even if there's a power outage or natural disaster somewhere. This is called redundancy. Then there is the so-called auto-scaling. This means apps or services can easily handle demand spikes. Thanks to the global infrastructure, users get faster load times and less lag. And finally, by using the infrastructure of the big players, it's easier to comply with local laws. Some countries require data to stay within borders. But data centres of the big three are nearly everywhere. Bottom line, without Amazon, Microsoft and Google and a few others, a lot of the apps you use every day wouldn't even exist, at least not as we know them. Digital technologies are the American export success story of the last decades. But under President Trump, confidence in US tech companies has dropped. Trump's administration has made it clear that it could weaponise its tech dominance through tariffs and restrictions. What if Trump decided to flip a switch and turn off the internet in a country to exert political pressure? That's why regions like the EU and India are pushing for their own digital solutions to avoid being impacted by US decisions. With the Eurostack plan, the EU wants to invest over 300 billion over a decade to build independent infrastructure. That includes independent servers and systems for critical infrastructure so Europe wouldn't fully rely on US tech giants anymore. But creating reliable global services for companies, it takes time, money and massive coordination. That's why many experts call for a clear international cooperation framework so that the digital gap doesn't get any wider than it already is. Cooperation could also help make the global internet more robust, especially against the threat of cyber attacks. What do you think? Should countries build their own internet or work together globally? Let us know in the comments.

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