The Great Disconnect: AWS Experiences Major Outage

By Aidan Low

January 5, 2026

On  Monday, October 20th, Amazon Web Services went off the web, leaving over 8 million people impacted. This occurred after an internal malfunction in a data centre in northern Virginia. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a branch of Amazon that stores data for companies, including apps such as Canvas, Canva, and games such as Roblox and Fortnite. It was initially planned as a data center so it could process holiday rush requests. Amazon then realized that for the rest of the year, they could sell storage to customers, resulting in further investments to build out the branch.

The outage showed how vulnerable the internet is; a small glitch can domino into a worldwide catastrophe. Many have expressed their distress on social media as their apps became unusable. Many have called for more diversity in programs that we use, so one outage will not take out the entire web.

Amazon is not the only company that runs the internet. In June of 2024, a CrowdStrike bug took down many Windows users, as well as 911 emergency services. As the public increases their reliance on online services, the effects of such outages and bugs may be more severe. Here at Jericho, Head of Technology Mike Larkin commented, "you have a lot of eggs in one basket, so something like what happened on that Monday could have a large impact, where a lot of things go down." However, if we use A.I. correctly, we can have a stronger "basket.” Mr. Larkin explained, "we might be able to incorporate A.I. into the systems to help restore the systems."

This outage is believed to cost over 2.5 billion dollars, according to experts. A major part of this cost is that Amazon had compensated over $518 million to the cybersecurity company CyberCube. Also, Delta Airlines had reported losses of up to 500 million dollars in flight cancellations and losses of online services. Major outages such as this happen at least once a year, and have gotten worse as time goes on.