Monday morning broke on internet users as Amazon Web Services spectacularly crashed, dragging with it everything from banking apps to video game platforms. The crash ran for several hours as well as cost companies tens of millions, leaving uncomfortable questions about our digital infrastructure’s resilience.
How a single Virginia data center brought down the internet
Amazon’s Northern Virginia US-EAST-1 data center was thrown into cyberspace chaos when core services like DynamoDB and EC2 started failing sometime between 8 AM British time. Problems spread globally in minutes, taking down large platforms that millions rely on every day. Snapchatters were unable to send snaps, Fortnite players were kicked out of games, and even banking apps like Coinbase crashed.
What started as some technical glitches in one data center quickly escalated into a global catastrophe. AWS engineers moved with alacrity to mitigate the loss, but by then the loss was already in the open. By 5:27 AM Eastern, when they uttered “significant signs of recovery,” countless organizations had already forfeited hours of income and productivity.
Services that went offline were:
- Social media: Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went down entirely
- Websites: YouTube Kids, Roblox TV halted
- Financial apps: Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, ceased working
- Work tools: Zoom calls wouldn’t go through, Slack fell quiet
Why does this outage run companies into millions an hour
The financial ruin was immense. The Amazon itself hemorrhaged more than 72 million an hour during the outage, with smaller businesses watching their streams of income disappear within a few minutes. Snapchat hemorrhaged more than 600,000 per hour, Zoom lost half a mil, and countless other operations lost the same. Those numbers only address part of the issue; however, lost customer trust combined with long-term reputation damage that will take years to repair is where the biggest damage is.
This was not another tech blunder. Industry observers likened it to the mythical 2024 CrowdStrike meltdown that shut down operations around the world. The chilling reality is that so much of our cyberinfrastructure is controlled by so few large players that when one stumbles on its heels, entire economies are destabilized.
“Users who hit a dead page don’t just patiently wait. They get frustrated and often turn to competitors” – Jovan Babovic, Tenscope
The hourly slaughter of money:
- Amazon losses:ย Lost almost $73 million
- Snapchat’s hit:ย Over $612,000 disappeared
- Zoom’s destruction: Over $532,000 vanished
What can companies do to never experience disasters again
Smarter companies are already reassessing cloud strategies after Monday’s bumout. The earlier practice of keeping all your digital eggs in a single basket now seems fraught with peril. Organizations that do not directly rely on AWS nonetheless may be dependent on those that do, with latent weaknesses that come to light only with big bumbles.ย Security experts pointย out that this centralization of power within several cloud behemoths fosters system-wide risks that can disable whole sectors with a mishap that is not properly remedied.
The fix is not easy, but it’s needed. Businesses must distribute their internet operations across several providers as well as geographies, create good backup mechanisms, and practice running their disaster plans frequently. The internet was developed to route around damage, but we managed to create new single points of failure that would puzzle our ancestors.
Essential protection measures:
- Diversify cloud providers rather than depending on a single one
- Spread operations geographically across various regions
- Test backup systems regularlyย to ensure they actually work
Monday’s AWS disaster is not going to be a one-time occurrence. As we become increasingly digital as a world, these disruptions are going to become more expensive and more disruptive. The survivors and thrivers are going to be those who can take this wake-up call as a lesson to design truly resilient infrastructure that can ride through that next inevitable hurricane.