If you couldn’t access your homework, order online, or watch your favourite TV show recently, you might’ve borne witness to Amazon Web Services’ internet-wide outage.
When Amazon’s cloud service platform experienced an outage on Oct. 20, it wasn’t just singular websites that flickered; it was large portions of the web, including academic services such as Wiley, as well as major apps, including Snapchat, Reddit, Zoom, and Pinterest.
From streaming services to urgent online forms, the incident exposed how dependent the digital economy has become on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and how fragile that dependence can be when even a well-resourced company stumbles.
AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon, is one of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure providers that offers specialty technology services to its clients globally. AWS holds approximately 37 per cent of the cloud computing market, and along with Google and Microsoft, the three companies service around 70 per cent of the market.
On Oct. 20, a fault in AWS’s infrastructure caused cascading failures across multiple regions. AWS reported that DNS resolution issues for regional DynamoDB endpoints triggered the outage. DNS, essentially a directory of IP addresses, failed to connect with DynamoDB—disrupting services for about 6.5 million users worldwide.
The problem originated in AWS’s US-East-1 data centre in Virginia, one of its oldest and most critical hubs, where the failure spread globally through core network and DNS systems.
The outage affected major services and customers, including platforms dependent on AWS for authentication, payment gateways, live streaming, and enterprise applications. The ripple reached not only consumer-facing services and companies’ internal business tools, but also consumers themselves.
For some Queen’s students, the outage wasn’t just a distant tech headline; it directly affected their daily lives.
In an interview with The Journal, Niva Dhir, ArtSci ’28, noted how deeply involved web services are in modern learning. “I couldn’t access my WileyPlus assignments for my chemistry class. It was really stressful because I had deadlines coming up, and suddenly I was locked out of my course materials.”
She added, “It made me realize how much we rely on these platforms for our learning.”
However, other students expressed the disruption felt outside of academics as well. In an interview with The Journal, Aditi Baroliya, ArtSci ’28, shared her experience during the outage.
“I was trying to order groceries online and everything just froze. It’s easy to forget how much of our lives are tied up in the cloud, but when major outages like this [the AWS outage] happen, it actually shows how dependent we are.”
As of 2024, AWS serves over five million registered companies worldwide, meaning that without even knowing it, everyone relies on AWS to use the internet on a day-to-day basis.
The AWS outage wasn’t just a technical hiccup—it was a reminder that in the age of cloud computing, digital infrastructure is both powerful and vulnerable. Cloud platforms deliver agility and scale but may also gatekeep innovation and concentrate failure points.
For consumers, the event invites reflection on the structure of the digital economy and who controls its scaffolding.
Tags
amazon, Online Learning, Social media
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