Amazon Web Services (AWS) has restored most of its services following a widespread outage that affected millions of users and disrupted major platforms worldwide for much of the day.

The outage, which originated in AWS’s US-East-1 data center region in Virginia, caused service failures across popular apps and websites including Fortnite, Snapchat, Alexa, and numerous enterprise platforms. The disruption began early Monday and led to large-scale connectivity problems for businesses and consumers across multiple countries.

AWS attributed the issue to a failure within its internal Domain Name System (DNS) and network load-balancer monitoring systems. As a result, services that rely on AWS’s cloud infrastructure experienced request failures, slow performance, or complete downtime.

By midday, AWS confirmed that mitigation steps had been implemented, and service performance began to improve. By late afternoon, the company reported that most key services — including EC2 instance launches and database operations — had returned to normal, although some users still encountered brief delays as backlogs were cleared.

The outage sparked renewed debate about the heavy global dependence on a small number of major cloud providers. Lawmakers and analysts raised concerns about the concentration of cloud infrastructure in the hands of a few tech giants and called for improved transparency and resilience measures.

AWS has announced that it will release a full post-incident report outlining the root cause and detailing steps to prevent a recurrence. Businesses affected by the disruption are now assessing the operational impact and reviewing their disaster recovery and redundancy strategies.

While services have largely recovered, industry experts warn that the scale of the outage serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities in global cloud reliance and the need for stronger multi-region infrastructure planning.