By Jason Mannet

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform that powers much of the internet, went down for several hours Monday, making several major websites and apps inoperable.

From banking services to social networks to airline booking sites to online shopping, thousands of services were disrupted as millions of people worldwide – many of whom were on their way to work on the US East Coast – were unable to mobile-order coffee or access key apps.

The latest outage serves as a reminder of how fragile the internet’s backbone can be, even if the disruption is brief, and how reliant the world has become on these online services.

Although AWS and its competitors are generally robust, the internet is a complex web of overlapping services that are only as reliable as their weakest code. The root cause of Monday’s outage remains unknown, but a service that converts friendly web names into IP addresses was unable to communicate with thousands of companies’ massive databases hosted by Amazon.

Past outages on this scale have been caused by a wide variety of errors, including faulty updates, the accidental injection of bad code, or a change to third-party software that doesn’t play nicely with a service. Rarely, internet cable cuts, cyberattacks or direct denial of service attacks can bring down or overload servers that host key apps.

But the relative frequency of these events shows the lack of necessary redundancies and competitive services. Too often, some internet experts say, companies put all their eggs in one cloud services basket.

There’s “no sign” that this was a cyberattack, according to Rob Jardin, chief digital officer at cybersecurity firm NymVPN, adding that it “looks like a technical fault affecting one of Amazon’s main data centers.”

“The internet was originally designed to be decentralized and resilient, yet today so much of our online ecosystem is concentrated in a small number of cloud regions,” he said in a note. “When one of those regions experiences a fault, the impact is immediate and widespread.”

Jardin said “these issues can happen when systems become overloaded or a key part of the network goes down; and because so many websites and apps rely on AWS, the impact spreads quickly.”

AWS doesn’t often experience major disruptions like this, with the last one occurring in 2021.

“That’s on par with the other major cloud providers and, in fact, it’s amazing that they’re able to run at the scale they do without more frequent disruptions,” said Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert and IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

“The reason these events attract much more notice is because of their impact,” he told CNN. “If a single company experiences an issue in their data center, it causes issues for that company’s products and services.”

In 2024, the largest-ever IT outage brought down large portions of the internet when a devastating CrowdStrike software glitch crashed computers, led to flight cancellations and disrupted hospitals around the globe, creating $5 billion in direct business losses. A bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system pushed a problematic update to computers around the world.

Also last year, AT&T’s network went down several times, including an 11-hour meltdown that prevented many gig workers from doing their jobs.

So, what went wrong Monday?

AWS is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services. In Amazon’s infancy, the company needed excess server capacity to ensure it had enough computing power to handle the massive amounts of traffic that came to its site during the holiday season rush. Amazon realized that during the rest of the year, it could use those servers to support other companies’ online needs, and out of that AWS was born.

Among AWS’ many offerings is DynamoDB, a database that hosts information for companies, including customer data. Amazon said Monday that its customers couldn’t access the data stored in DynamoDB, because the Domain Name System (DNS) – a kind of phone book for the internet – had encountered a problem.

DNS is like an internet location engine, converting user-friendly web addresses like amazon.com into IP addresses – a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” said Chapple. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”

It’s not clear what caused the DNS outage, but it lasted only a few hours. By 6:35 am ET, Amazon had fixed the DNS problem and recommended companies dump their cache – temporary storage files – to help speed up the restoration of their services.

Amazon said the outage continued to affect other AWS services, including EC2 – a kind of virtual server many companies use to build their online applications.

The company will likely conduct a postmortem and explain what went wrong with its DNS system in the coming days.

By Flint Jurgens

A 42 year-old entrepreneur who was the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space is on his way to becoming the head of Nasa. Jared Isaacman won approval from a key Senate committee and now only needs to clear a vote of the full chamber to lead an agency that has set its sights on returning to the moon. While he is expected to win that vote, the billionaire with ties Elon Musk has encountered scepticism. Members of both parties asked at his confirmation hearing about possible conflicts of interest, his desire to send astronauts to Mars, and budget cuts. President Donald Trump has said Mr Isaacman's leadership will pave the way "for groundbreaking achievements" in science and technology. The committee voted 19 to 9 to send his nomination to the full chamber, with most of the votes against him coming from Democrats. Mr Isaacman, along with Space X's Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is among a new wave of billionaires who have been challenging the old order in space. They have accelerated the pace of innovation and are aiming to dramatically reduce the cost of human space travel. He'll be expected to do the same at Nasa, whose space programmes are regarded by private sector operators as wasteful and often significantly over budget. Mr Isaacman has said that the major aerospace contractors are "incentivised to be economically inefficient". He has made it clear he would like to expand the human spaceflight programme at the agency. In a confirmation hearing on 9 April, Mr Isaacman said he hoped to pursue the Artemis mission to the moon, as well as potential missions to Mars. But lawmakers feared he would sacrifice the long-planned moon mission to focus on Mars. He sought to reassure them that the two were related and "we could be paralleling these efforts and doing the near-impossible". "We will prioritise sending American astronauts to Mars and along the way we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the moon," he said. "We don't have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars," he later added. During the confirmation process, it emerged that he had been arrested at the Canadian border in 2010 and returned to Nevada to face charges that he had passed bad checks to casinos. In a questionnaire, Mr Isaacman said that the dispute with the Palms Casino in Las Vegas stemmed from a travel reimbursement that the resort promised but failed to deliver. He added that the issue was resolved in 24 hours, with charges dismissed and court records sealed. On the day of his nomination in December, Mr Isaacman posted a statement on X that gave an early glimpse into his vision: "This second space age has only just begun." "There will inevitably be a thriving space economy – one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space," he wrote. "At Nasa, we will… usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilisation."