Internet Meltdown: Snapchat, others crash as Amazon cloud fails 

A massive technical glitch at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday morning has triggered a global internet disruption, taking down hundreds of popular websites and digital platforms from Snapchat and Fortnite to Duolingo and even Amazon.com itself.

According to data from DownDetector, the outage began shortly after 8am BST, with more than 6,000 reports flooding in from affected users in the United States and over 1,600 complaints from the United Kingdom.

The disruption has also affected Amazon Alexa, Ring, and Prime Video, leaving users unable to access smart home devices or stream content.

Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore from ESET told the Daily Mail that the incident is “highly likely due to an internal error” within Amazon’s infrastructure.

“AWS has about 30 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market which makes up a large proportion of the internet,” Moore said. “So an outage like this can hit hard across the world.”

The issue is believed to have originated from Amazon’s data center facilities in North Virginia, one of the company’s largest and most critical hubs for hosting and networking.

On its AWS Health Dashboard, the tech giant confirmed that an “operational issue” is affecting “multiple services,” adding that engineers were “actively working to mitigate the issue and identify the root cause.”

While some outages can result from cyberattacks, Moore said this particular disruption appears to have caused a “cascading failure” — where one malfunctioning system triggers others across the network.

“Because so many apps and websites rely so heavily on AWS for cloud hosting and data processing, the disruption rapidly becomes widespread and creates a knock-on effect,” he said.

Amazon Web Services, a backbone of the global internet, powers servers and storage for governments, universities, and companies worldwide. Monday’s outage serves as a sharp reminder of just how dependent the world has become on a handful of tech giants to keep the web running smoothly