A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption on Monday rippled through the global digital economy, taking down platforms like Netflix, Slack, and even the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website. The outage lasted several hours and was traced back to a “network connectivity issue” in the company’s U.S.-East-1 region one of Amazon’s most critical data centers. The malfunction caused widespread delays for millions of users who rely on AWS for everything from streaming content to executing financial transactions.

Amazon moved quickly to contain the disruption, assuring clients that its engineers were working “around the clock” to restore services. However, the incident reignited debates around the concentration of digital power among a few major cloud providers namely Amazon, Microsoft, and Google  that collectively handle over two-thirds of all global cloud traffic. Each outage raises fresh questions about resilience, redundancy, and risk exposure across sectors increasingly dependent on real-time data access.