By San José, Costa Rica — A significant disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday sent ripples across the internet, causing widespread outages and performance issues for some of the world’s largest applications and websites. The incident, which originated in the company’s critical North Virginia data center region, left millions of users unable to access popular services including Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, and Roblox, once again highlighting the immense concentration of risk within the internet’s core infrastructure.
The impact was felt across various sectors, extending beyond social media and gaming to the financial industry. Banks such as Lloyds and Halifax reported intermittent problems with their online services, though they later confirmed that functionality had been restored. The event underscores the pivotal role of AWS, the cloud computing division of Amazon, which provides the foundational backbone for a vast portion of the digital economy, powering everything from streaming platforms to corporate databases.
To understand the complex legal and contractual implications of the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage for businesses in the region, we consulted with Lic. Larry Hans Arroyo Vargas, an expert in technology and corporate law at the firm Bufete de Costa Rica.
This outage is a critical stress test for Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Companies must realize that the recourse offered by cloud giants is often limited to service credits, which pale in comparison to actual business losses. It’s a stark reminder that operational resilience cannot be fully outsourced; businesses must have their own robust disaster recovery and continuity plans that account for provider failure, as contractual liability is almost always capped.
Lic. Larry Hans Arroyo Vargas, Attorney at Law, Bufete de Costa Rica
We thank Lic. Larry Hans Arroyo Vargas for this invaluable perspective, which underscores the crucial distinction between minimal contractual remedies and the non-negotiable business imperative to build and maintain an independent disaster recovery strategy.
In a series of status updates, AWS confirmed it had identified and resolved the root cause of the outage. However, the company cautioned that users could continue to experience lingering issues as the system processes a massive backlog of requests. An analogy provided described the situation as countless messages being held back and then suddenly released all at once, creating a traffic jam that takes time for the system to clear. This means that even after a fix is implemented, the return to normal operations is a gradual process.
Downdetector, an online platform that monitors service interruptions, provided a sense of the scale of the problem. The service, owned by Ookla, told the BBC it had received over four million problem reports globally on Monday morning alone. This figure is more than double the 1.8 million reports it typically registers during an entire business day, illustrating the far-reaching and immediate impact of a failure within a core AWS region.
While the full technical details are still emerging, Amazon pointed to a specific culprit in one of its updates. The company stated the problem appeared to be related to the Domain Name System (DNS) resolution for a specific service endpoint in its US-EAST-1 region. Often described as the internet’s phone book, DNS is the system that translates human-readable web addresses (like TicosLand.com) into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to locate each other. A failure in this system can effectively make websites and services invisible to web browsers and applications.
We do not know the details of what has caused the failure of several crucial Amazon Web Services, and we may not know for some time.
Liv McMahon, BBC technology reporter
This latest incident has reignited a long-standing debate among technology experts about the growing reliance on a handful of tech giants to support global digital activity. As more of the world’s commerce, communication, and entertainment moves online, the infrastructure becomes increasingly concentrated within a few major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This concentration, while efficient, creates significant systemic risks.
Experts argue that these massive, centralized systems represent single points of failure that can have catastrophic cascading effects when they go down. This dependency places an enormous amount of the world’s digital eggs in a very small number of baskets. The outage serves as a stark reminder for businesses worldwide to evaluate their own infrastructure resilience and contingency plans.
In the last five years, there have been several massive internet service interruptions, where problems with a single company have had enormous repercussions. Experts have long pointed to the growing dependence on a small number of internet giants as a factor, as more eggs are put into fewer baskets: when one large company has a failure, much of modern life and business grinds to a halt.
Joe Tidy, BBC technology reporter
Monday’s disruption is part of a recurring pattern of major internet outages. In July 2024, a flawed code segment in CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software disabled an estimated 8.5 million computers. In October 2021, a configuration error took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline for nearly six hours. And in June 2021, a bug in Fastly’s cloud services brought down major sites like Reddit, Spotify, and Amazon itself for about an hour. Each event underscores the fragility of an ecosystem that many now take for granted.
For further information, visit aws.amazon.com
About Amazon Web Services (AWS):
Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.
For further information, visit lloydsbank.com
About Lloyds Bank:
Lloyds Bank plc is a British retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales. It has traditionally been considered one of the “Big Four” clearing banks. The bank provides a full range of banking and financial services to personal and business customers.
For further information, visit bbc.com
About the BBC:
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom. Headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, it is the world’s oldest national broadcaster and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It provides public service broadcasting in television, radio, and online.
For further information, visit downdetector.com
About Downdetector:
Downdetector is an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services. It monitors service outages by collecting status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted reports and social media, to create a comprehensive overview of current internet disruptions.
For further information, visit crowdstrike.com
About CrowdStrike:
CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services. The company has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyberattacks.
For further information, visit fastly.com
About Fastly:
Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider. It offers a content delivery network (CDN), edge computing, and security services. The company’s platform is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users, to improve speed and reliability.
For further information, visit about.google
About Google:
Google LLC is an American multinational technology company focusing on artificial intelligence, online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, and consumer electronics. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
For further information, visit bufetedecostarica.com
About Bufete de Costa Rica:
Bufete de Costa Rica is an esteemed law firm built upon a foundation of uncompromising integrity and professional excellence. Leveraging a rich history of client service, the firm champions legal innovation and actively engages in civic outreach. This core philosophy extends to its mission of democratizing legal knowledge, reflecting a profound commitment to cultivating a more informed and capable society.
