In a world where a single point of failure can throw our machines into chaos, everything from sharks to authoritarian governments and old ladies have brought the web to its knees.
It’s a reminder of just how fragile the internet services we rely upon can be. On Monday 20 October 2025, millions of users woke to find their favourite apps, gaming sites, online banking and internet tools were not available. The problem is thought to have been caused by an error with a database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the online retailer’s cloud computing division.
AWS provides online computing infrastructure for millions of large companies’ websites and platforms. The outage affected the hugely popular games Roblox, Fortnite and Pokémon Go, the social media platform Snapchat, productivity tools Slack and Monday.com, along with dozens of banks.
It is the latest in a number of high-profile outages to have hit the internet recently. As our infrastructure becomes ever more tangled with the internet, this won’t be the last catastrophic online outage either. The history of computing is littered with examples of our digital fragility, and crashes of the past offer a glimpse of what it will feel like on the day the internet turns off.
On Friday 19 July, 2024, the world woke up to what many have called the worst digital crisis of all time. A botched software update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike crashed some 8.5 million computers, smearing Microsoft’s dreaded “blue screen of death” across the globe. Airlines cancelled over 46,000 flights in a single day, according to the FlightAware. Hospitals called off surgeries. 911 emergency services faced disruptions in the US. Film Forum, an arthouse cinema in New York, switched to cash payments as its credit card system went down. Microsoft and CrowdStrike issued a solution, but the disruption it caused continued for several days afterwards. It’s a reminder, frustrated IT experts said, to never push updates out on a Friday.
“There’s a price to pay for the convenience we enjoy,” says Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst. “It will happen again, and from a technical standpoint, the fix for CrowdStrike was relatively easy. Next time, we might not be so lucky.”
Wow