AWS outage turned a mundane DNS slip into global chaos
Few alternatives match AWS’s scale beyond Azure and Google Cloud.

Cloudflare’s boss summed up the mood after Monday’s chaos, relieved his firm wasn’t to blame as outages rippled across more than 1,000 companies. Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, banks, and government portals faltered together, exposing how much of the web leans on Amazon Web Services.
AWS is the backbone for a vast slice of the internet, renting compute, storage, and databases so firms avoid running their own stacks. However, a mundane Domain Name System error in its Northern Virginia region scrambled routing, leaving services online yet unreachable as traffic lost its map.
Engineers call it a classic failure mode: ‘It’s always DNS.’ Misconfigurations, maintenance slips, or server faults can cascade quickly across shared platforms. AWS says teams moved to mitigate, but the episode showed how a small mistake at scale becomes a global headache in minutes.
Experts warned of concentration risk: when one hyperscaler stumbles, many fall. Yet few true alternatives exist at AWS’s scale beyond Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with smaller rivals from IBM to Alibaba, and fledgling European plays, far behind.
Calls for UK–EU cloud sovereignty are growing, but timelines and costs are steep. Monday’s outage is a reminder that resilience needs multi-region and multi-cloud designs, tested failovers, and clear incident comms, not just faith in a single provider.
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