Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially disclosed the root cause of a significant outage that led to widespread internet disruptions. The cloud computing giant confirmed that services have now returned to normal operations after the incident, which affected numerous websites and online platforms globally for over two hours.

The disruption prompted thousands of user reports on the tracking website Downdetector.com, highlighting the extensive impact on services across various sectors including finance, media, and e-commerce. AWS acknowledged the issue on its status page during the event, stating they were actively working on recovery.

Root Cause Identified in US-EAST-1 Region

In a subsequent update, Amazon identified the source of the problem. The outage was traced back to an issue within its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Specifically, AWS reported an “increased error rate” that was isolated to a single availability zone within its influential US-EAST-1 Region.

This particular region is one of Amazon’s largest and oldest data center regions, and issues originating there often have a cascading effect on global internet traffic and services that rely on its infrastructure. The company focused its recovery efforts on this specific zone to resolve the widespread problems.

Global Impact and Service Restoration

Despite the issue being localized to a single availability zone, its impact was felt worldwide due to the interconnected nature of cloud services. Many international companies and platforms depending on the US-EAST-1 region experienced downtime or performance degradation. The outage persisted for more than two hours before resolution.

Following the implementation of a fix, AWS updated its status page to confirm the outcome. The company stated, “We have resolved the issue and all services have returned to normal operations.” This announcement signaled the end of the disruption and the restoration of stability for its global customer base.