Amazon Web Services, a key pillar of the global internet, experienced a major outage on Monday, disrupting popular platforms such as Robinhood, Snapchat, and Fortnite.

The widespread downtime caused confusion online and fueled viral rumours of a Chinese cyberattack, though experts suggest the cause was likely technical rather than geopolitical.

According to Amazon’s status page, the disruption originated in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region — a major hub for global internet traffic — which reported “increased error rates and latency” across multiple services.

The issue quickly rippled across the globe, affecting everything from retail transactions to streaming platforms.

Reports from The Verge and The Guardian confirmed that the outage originated within AWS itself, not from an external attack.

However, its timing reignited public debate over the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to foreign cyber threats.

At the height of the disruption, AWS-hosted services such as Alexa, Robinhood, and Snapchat went partially offline, sparking widespread social media panic and causing Amazon’s stock to slip by 0.8 per cent during intraday trading.

Cybersecurity analysts have urged caution, noting there is no verified evidence connecting the outage to any Chinese state-sponsored attack, according to THE ECONOMIC TIMES

They point out that previous AWS disruptions, including major incidents in 2021 and 2023, were ultimately traced to internal network configuration problems and operational errors rather than external hacking attempts.

They however warned that the AWS outage highlights a deeper systemic risk, the world’s heavy reliance on a handful of cloud providers.

A single glitch or misconfiguration in one AWS region can effectively “pause the internet,” underscoring the growing centralization and fragility of global digital infrastructure.