Why an AWS Outage Could Bring Down the Internet

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If you used the internet on Monday, you probably noticed that a lot of things weren’t working so well. Websites and services around the world experienced outages, including Facebook, McDonald’s, and even Fortnite . You may have already heard that the problems were caused by an AWS outage . However, if you don’t know what AWS is, this explanation may be confusing.

Amazon Web Services runs the internet.

AWS, an Amazon subsidiary and short for Amazon Web Services, offers customers over 200 cloud products , including applications across all of the following verticals:

  • Access to AWS services

  • Analytics

  • Application integration

  • Blockchain

  • Business applications

  • Cloud financial management

  • Calculate

  • Customer support

  • Containers

  • Databases

  • Developer tools

  • End-user computing

  • Frontend of web and mobile services

  • Gaming technologies

  • Internet of Things

  • Machine learning and AI

  • Management and regulation

  • media

  • Migration and translation

  • Networking and content delivery

  • Quantum technologies

  • Satellite

  • Security, Identification, and Compliance

  • Storage

Beyond this list, it’s important to understand why AWS is so important. This service eliminates the need for companies to purchase their own hardware for data storage, networking, and computing tasks. Instead, they can outsource these tasks to AWS and adapt these services as their needs change. Thus, a company might initially hire AWS to process a small amount of data, but as the company grows, it can add more servers to its plan rather than investing in additional processing hardware. This is called cloud computing.

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To meet global demand, AWS utilizes a large number of physical server locations scattered around the world. Amazon claims that AWS has 120 “availability zones” across 38 regions —physical locations containing at least one data center with “redundant power, network connectivity, and other capabilities.” The idea is that having these physical data centers across continents simplifies cloud computing expansion and improves its resilience to failures, which is somewhat ironic given current events.

How much of the internet runs on AWS?

In theory, cloud computing offers many advantages. It can be much easier and more cost-effective for a company to lease AWS servers and technology to support its applications, store data, or handle traffic. As such, much of the world runs on AWS. According to HG Insights , 4.19 million companies with a physical address use AWS as of 2025. (There appears to be no data on customers without a physical address, so the number could be much higher.) Furthermore, AWS is currently the largest cloud computing company in the market: the same report indicates that AWS holds 30% of the market, while competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud hold 20% and 12%, respectively.

Why the AWS Outage Is Such a Big Problem

When so many companies rely on cloud computing to run their internet services, the risk of disruption is extremely high. This is precisely what we saw on Monday: AWS outages disrupted numerous websites and services. If HG Insights is correct, up to 30% of companies using some type of cloud service could be affected by this outage. One analyst estimates the impact of the outage could amount to billions of dollars in lost revenue. While it’s unclear what the solution is, it’s clear there’s a danger that a significant portion of the internet relies on a single cloud hosting service.

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