On Monday, a major outage affected 'half the internet' with millions of people left unable to access sites including Snapchat, Fornite, Duolingo, as well as several banking apps.

While AWS seems to be up and running, a leading cyber expert, Zain Javed, CTO at Citatio

Talking about the event on Monday in more detail Javed said,"The outage is the type of cascading failure you get when a major cloud provider – in this case Amazon Web Services (AWS) – has infrastructure issues. This was a major disruption specifically linked to their DynamoDB database service in the US-East-1 region. When AWS stumbles, the internet shakes, because it underpins everything from Snapchat and Alexa to banking apps and streaming platforms.”

Despite AWS being able to identify the root cause and most requests are now succeeding, some systems are still catching up.

This means users have to be more vigilant, “Outages mean systems are stressed: backup processes may be engaged, secondary networks might be used, monitoring may be degraded and engineers are often focused on restoration rather than defence. During that window of weakness attackers can exploit misconfigurations, weak access controls or overlooked credentials. A system under strain is more likely to have gaps and fewer defenders actively watching for them.”

“What isn’t getting ladder-height attention is the dependency risk during an outage. Many organisations rely on third-party cloud or infrastructure providers (like AWS). When one goes down, your fallback may be a less-resilient system or a manual process that was never hardened for full production. Attackers monitor for these moments of weak configuration or exposure. A major outage is not just a service interruption — it’s a window when the guard rails are down. Businesses should treat outage events as incident windows, not just recovery events.”