Amazon's AWS outage meant big problems for large swaths of the internet. What have we learned in the past 24 hours?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage Monday, impacting multiple websites in the US-EAST-1 Region, according to the company's health dashboard. Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite were just a few of the platforms experiencing issues following the outage.

Experts say the incident revealed what can happen when a such a broad spectrum of companies rely on singular cloud provider.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a bad day. That's how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that Monday's outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.

Widespread internet outages were reported early on Monday, taking down popular services including Snapchat, Fortnite and Roblox, as Amazon Web Services said there was an issue they were working to mitigate.

According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services" in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday.

In making sense of all the hullabaloo, cybersecurity expert David Kennedy just dropped a curt and pertinent take on the AWS outage.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday made global headlines after knocking some of the world's largest sites offline for hours. For users, the impacts ranged from the serious - such as not being able to access vital banking, government or work services - to the not-so-serious, such as fears of losing long built-up streaks on Duolingo.

Following the AWS outage, former FBI agent Eric O'Neill shares his take on the future of cybersecurity skills, certifications, and resilience in the workforce for 2026.