A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) today disrupted a wide range of popular internet services and applications across the globe, affecting banks, airlines, media platforms, delivery apps, and more. AWS, which powers significant portions of the internet through its cloud infrastructure, experienced a failure tied to its Domain Name System (DNS), which prevented access to key services like DynamoDB and EC2. Although customer data remained intact, the inability to resolve DNS requests meant that apps couldn’t connect to their data, resulting in what one expert described as “temporary internet amnesia.” The issue began in the early morning hours and lasted a few hours, though some services continued to face delays as systems process backlogs.

The incident highlighted the fragility of modern infrastructure, which depends heavily on constant connectivity. The outage impacted high-profile services including Snapchat, Canva, Delta Airlines, Coinbase, and major UK banks like Lloyds and Halifax. Although AWS is working to restore functionality and implement fixes, the root cause remains under investigation, raising questions about redundancy, failover planning, and resilience in highly interconnected systems.

This event underscores the critical need for end-to-end infrastructure monitoring and observability with a system like NIKSUN. Comprehensive visibility across all layers, including the network (including DNS and web) using deep packet inspection (DPI) and flow collection, systems via SNMP polling, and applications through logs, metrics, and tracing - is essential to detecting, diagnosing, and mitigating failures in real time. Without such an approach, organizations are left unable to resolve cascading issues. A layered, unified observability strategy not only helps pinpoint the origin of problems faster but also ensures business continuity in a landscape where even small glitches can lead to global disruptions. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page