(Gray News/AP) – A massive Amazon Web Services outage caused major disruptions around the world Monday.

While the outages lasted several hours, Amazon has said most systems should be back online and operating normally.

EN ESPAÑOL | Fallos en Amazon Web Services provocan interrupciones en todo el mundo

The company reported that 64 internal AWS services were affected by the issue.

AWS customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations.

The cloud-based computer service hosts many websites for companies like the government, universities and many media organizations, to name a few.

Additionally, several users reported having issues on trying to use Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, the McDonald’s app and many other services, according to the Associated Press.

Even Amazon’s own services were not immune. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.

Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses so websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.

AWS began investigating the issue just after 3 a.m. (ET), according to its website. The company identified a potential cause for the errors around 5 a.m. (ET), saying it stems from an error with DynamoDB – a system for managing database tables and indexes.

“We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information,” a post from AWS read at 5:27 a.m. (ET).

Around 6 a.m. (ET), Amazon said it was seeing recovery across most of the impacted services.

At 6:30 a.m. (ET), Amazon confirmed that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.”

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.

And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.

“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve)” and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess said.

“This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue, something’s gone wrong and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.

There are “well-established processes” to deal with outages at Amazon Web Services, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, which together provide most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, Burgess said, adding that such outages are usually fixed in “hours rather than days.”

This is not the first time issues with Amazon’s key services have caused widespread disruptions. Many popular internet services were down after a brief outage in 2023.

AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies -- everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services -- were affected for more than five hours. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017.

Copyright 2025 Gray Local Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.