The Amazon Web Services logo and a person typing on a laptop.

By Chris Spiker From Daily Voice

A major Amazon Web Services outage brought parts of the global economy to a halt, disrupting everything from banking apps to airline systems.

The incident, centered in AWS's massive US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, started overnight on Monday, Oct. 20. According to analytics tracker BuiltWith, the problems impacted an estimated 76 million websites, including Daily Voice.

The outage affected a wide range of popular apps and companies. Those suffering outages also included Amazon, Canva, Coinbase, Delta Air Lines, Disney+, Hinge, Lyft, Reddit, Ring, Robinhood, Roblox, Signal, Snapchat, United Airlines, and Venmo. 

AWS traced the outage to a Domain Name System (DNS) error that disrupted connections to its DynamoDB database system. Engineers fixed the issue, but disruptions persisted for nearly 15 hours before all services returned to "normal operations" by 6:01 p.m. EDT.

Economists say the AWS outage could have a financial impact of hundreds of billions of dollars due to lost productivity and halted operations, according to CNN.

"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," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint.

Analysts said the failure exposed the risks of global dependence on a handful of cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to run essential services. 

"Businesses are only as resilient as the weakest link in their service-supply chain," said Abigail Wright, a business-resilience expert at ChamberofCommerce.org. "The recent AWS outage reveals how an upstream provider's lapse becomes downstream business risk."

Even small businesses indirectly using cloud services through third-party vendors felt the effects.

"When your customers can't access your service because your cloud provider is down, it doesn't matter how strong your front-end brand is," Wright said. "The backbone behind it has to be robust."

Forbes reported that the financial sector is now speeding up plans to diversify its digital infrastructure. Regulators in the United Kingdom and European Union have pushed banks to adopt "multi-cloud" strategies, which spread services across several providers to avoid single points of failure.

Amazon said it'll share a detailed "post-event summary" about the AWS outage.