A worldwide disruption of Amazon Web Services on Monday could carry a staggering financial toll reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to experts cited by CNN.
The outage crippled vast swaths of the internet, halting operations for major companies and revealing how dependent global commerce has become on Amazon's cloud infrastructure.
Amazon said its systems are now back online after connectivity issues persisted for much of the day. The company reported it had "fully mitigated" an earlier failure, though problems continued to affect some users even after recovery efforts were declared complete.
The disruption rippled through nearly every corner of the digital economy. Snapchat, Facebook, and Fortnite were among the popular platforms that went dark, while banks, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and AI firm Perplexity reported service interruptions.
U.S. airlines Delta and United also confirmed system problems linked to the outage.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet monitoring firm Catchpoint, told CNN that the incident's financial impact "will easily reach into the hundreds of billions," citing massive productivity losses and operational shutdowns across industries.
Analysts said the figure includes both direct losses and the cascading costs of halted digital transactions.
The failure began in AWS' U.S. East-1 region in Northern Virginia, a hub that powers many of the world's largest websites. It quickly spread to users in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
The Guardian reported more than 2,000 companies were affected, with over 8 million outage reports globally, while Downdetector logged more than 11 million complaints during the peak of the disruption.
Amazon said service levels have been restored, but lingering issues persisted in some areas.
The Guardian noted that certain applications continued to experience slowdowns throughout the day as systems cleared backlogs and reconnected to AWS servers.
Industry experts said the outage exposes the fragility of modern digital infrastructure.
FinTech Magazine reported that businesses' heavy reliance on a handful of cloud providers has created "a single point of failure" for the global economy, where one provider's stumble can paralyze millions of users.
While AWS has weathered outages before, analysts said Monday's event was one of its most far-reaching. The scale and economic impact, they said, are likely to reignite debate over the risks of cloud concentration and the urgent need for stronger backup and diversification plans.
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