AWS Outage – Amazon Just Went Down and Took Half the Internet with It
This morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the backbone of much of the modern internet suffered a major outage originating from its North Virginia (US-EAST-1) data centre.
The ripple effect was immediate and global: platforms like Snapchat, Canva, Roblox, Venmo, Coinbase, and even HMRC and Vodafone were knocked offline or severely disrupted. For digital agencies and enterprise clients, the incident is more than a temporary inconvenience, it’s a wake-up call.
What Caused the Amazon Outage?
At around 8am UK time, AWS began reporting “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services, including DynamoDB and EC2, two of its most critical infrastructure components. These services underpin everything from user authentication to real-time data processing. The root cause appears to be a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint, which cascaded across other AWS services.
Why It Matters to Digital Agencies and their Clients
For agencies managing enterprise-grade digital platforms, especially those hosted on AWS, this outage exposes a fundamental vulnerability: single-cloud dependency. When AWS falters, so do the websites, apps, and services built on top of it, regardless of how well they’re architected.
This morning, marketing teams couldn’t access Canva to launch campaigns. Retailers saw e-commerce carts fail. Financial platforms couldn’t authenticate users. And for agencies, client calls started flooding in with one question: “Why is our site down?”
The Enterprise Risk
Enterprise clients often choose AWS for its scalability, global reach, and integration with modern DevOps workflows. But today’s outage shows that even the most robust cloud platforms are not immune to failure. For businesses with high uptime SLAs, regulatory obligations, or customer-facing platforms, the cost of downtime can be both reputational and financial.
What the Outage Reveals About Cloud Fragility
Today’s AWS outage wasn’t just a technical hiccup, it was a stark reminder of how deeply embedded cloud infrastructure is in our daily digital lives. When a single region of AWS falters, the domino effect can be global.
For digital agencies, this highlights a critical truth: no platform is too big to fail.
The incident exposes how many enterprise platforms rely on tightly coupled cloud services, often without adequate redundancy. Authentication systems failed, content delivery slowed to a crawl, and entire customer journeys were interrupted. Even organisations with sophisticated DevOps pipelines found themselves scrambling.
This isn’t about blaming AWS. It’s about recognising that cloud resilience isn’t automatic; it’s engineered. And it’s the responsibility of digital agencies to help clients build that resilience into their platforms.
Whether it’s through architectural choices, backup strategies, or proactive support and SLAs, agencies must be ready to respond when the cloud stumbles, and help clients recover quickly.
The Bigger Picture
This outage is a reminder that the internet’s infrastructure is fragile, and that digital agencies play a critical role in helping clients navigate that fragility. Whether it’s legacy system rescue or future-proofing cloud architecture, today’s events reinforce the need for strategic technical leadership.
As AWS works to restore services, agencies should be working to restore confidence, and rethink how they architect digital platforms for resilience.
Need an Unbiased Review of Your Hosting Setup?
If today’s outage has you questioning your platform’s resilience, now’s the time to act. Get in touch with ClerksWell to speak with a technical lead about your current hosting architecture. We’ll help you assess risks, explore alternatives, and build a plan B that protects your business - no matter what cloud you’re on.