An hours-long crash of Amazon Web Services sparked a wave of tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic memes Monday as social media users coped with the disruption of major sites and apps around the world.
Posts on X, Reddit and more mocked the meltdown with viral images including Homer Simpson warning “The end is near,” the popular cartoon-dog meme once again declaring amid flames, “This is fine,” and clips asking, “What do we do now?”
While most services were back online within hours, the social-media reaction was relentless. Users joked that the collapse of their favorite apps was “the rehearsal for the end of the internet.”
Echoing the renowned yellow-dog meme, one user posted an image of panicked office workers insisting, “I’m fine … everything is fine.”
Others posted clips of users screaming into phones or mock-photos of engineers surrounded by yellow caution tape in server rooms.
The online mockery followed a disruption that began around 3 a.m. ET and rippled across banks, retailers and gaming platforms before Amazon engineers restored most systems shortly after 5:30 a.m., according to the company’s service-status page.
Amazon said the incident stemmed from an “operational issue” affecting multiple services “in the US-EAST-1 region,” with a massive data hub in Northern Virginia linked to the crash.
In an update, the company reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services” and said engineers were “actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause.”
By early morning, Amazon said most websites and apps relying on its cloud were working normally again while staff continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”
The two-hour outage left millions of users unable to log in to platforms including Roblox, Snapchat, Ring, Fortnite, Hulu, Venmo, Coinbase, WhatsApp, the Starbucks app and Microsoft 365.
The British government’s official website and online tax portal also went dark, as did McDonald’s ordering systems in some markets, according to reports.
Screenshots posted to X showed AWS’ support account replying to waves of complaints as hashtags like #AWSdown and #internetcrash trended worldwide.
For many, the disruption served as a reminder that much of the modern web depends on a handful of cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — whose outages can halt communication, commerce and entertainment within seconds.
Harry Halpin, chief executive of NymVPN, told the New York Times that the problem likely began with a technical glitch in one of Amazon’s main data centers.
But, he added, the company’s systems are inherently opaque, making it impossible to know the cause unless Amazon disclosed it, according to the Times.
“If your entire nation’s infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that’s an exceedingly dangerous situation,” Halpin was quoted as saying.
Amazon has not indicated that the breakdown was caused by a cyberattack. The company said engineers are reviewing logs to determine what triggered the failure.
Monday’s disruption echoed previous incidents in which faults inside major cloud or security firms cascaded across the internet.
In July 2024, a faulty update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike caused a daylong global outage that grounded airlines and disrupted hospitals and governments.
AWS, which supplies hosting power to thousands of companies worldwide, generates roughly 20% of Amazon’s total sales and about 60% of its operating profit, according to company filings.
Despite the chaos, Amazon shares were little changed in early trading Monday as markets opened, signaling investors saw the glitch as temporary.
