A large-scale disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this week caused major outages across websites and apps worldwide, affecting users from the Americas to Europe and Asia. The company later confirmed that the issue has been mitigated, with most services restored by Monday afternoon.

The disruption began in the US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, and stemmed from an internal DNS resolution fault tied to the company’s infrastructure.

As many global services rely on AWS’s shared infrastructure, the failure quickly propagated to platforms spanning social media, streaming, finance, and government systems — including apps such as Snapchat, Venmo, Roblox, and UK banking services.

Although AWS declared that services returned to “normal operations” by the evening, the incident has renewed concerns over the vulnerability of modern digital systems that depend heavily on a small number of cloud providers. Experts are warning organisations to review their contingency plans, diversify infrastructure and strengthen resilience against similar future failures.