Earlier today, a sweeping outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought down a wide swath of the internet, disrupting major social apps, games and financial services. The cloud service provider reported increased error rates and latency for its systemsparticularly in the US-EAST-1 region, leading to platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal and numerous banking and government services reporting failures or slowdowns. 

AWS said that many services “should now be succeeding normally” after mitigation efforts, while investigations point to a malfunction in its DynamoDB database endpoint as a likely cause. The incident underscores how heavily the digital economy depends on a handful of cloud infrastructure providers and how a fault in one node can ripple out globally.