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Over 1,000 apps and sites—including social platforms like Snapchat and banks such as Lloyds and Halifax—were affected by issues that Amazon said originated at the core of its U.S. operations.

Outage-monitoring service Downdetector reported that user submissions worldwide topped 11 million during Monday’s disruption.

Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said, “This incident has shown how interdependent our infrastructure is.”

“Many online services rely on third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can arise even at the largest third-party providers.”

“Often, small human errors can have widespread and significant effects,” he added.

The issues appeared to start around 7:00 a.m. Monday as users began reporting trouble accessing various platforms.

A wide array of services was affected—from massive online games like Fortnite to language-learning apps like Duolingo.

Downdetector told the BBC it received more than four million reports from users across 500 sites within just a few hours—over twice the number it typically sees on a weekday.

The reports later surpassed 11 million as more services, such as Reddit and Lloyds Bank, struggled to recover.

Amazon said that by around 11:00 p.m., all AWS services had “returned to normal operations.”

The company has not yet fully explained the cause of Monday’s outage or issued an official statement.

An update on the service-status page said the issue “appeared to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”

DNS, the Domain Name System, is often likened to the internet’s phone book.

It translates human-readable site names (like bbc.co.uk) into numerical addresses that computers can read and understand.

This process underpins how we use the internet, and disruptions can prevent browsers from finding the content they’re seeking.