Early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the foremost global provider of cloud computing solutions, encountered a major outage that disrupted a wide range of services worldwide. This included AI platforms, government websites, and fintech applications.
By around 9:00 AM South African time, a surge in reports about service interruptions was recorded on Downdetector. The immediate response within local WhatsApp groups was one of irritation and concern. Shireen Motara, founder of The Next Chapter Studio, a coaching enterprise, commented, “Canva is offline, and it feels like everything has come to a standstill.” Canva, a crucial design tool for countless entrepreneurs, marketers, and content creators in South Africa, was notably affected.
AWS later traced the disruption to a fault in a regional gateway on the US East Coast. Although services were largely restored about three hours after the initial alert, some users continued to experience sporadic connectivity and delays.
For many professionals in South Africa, this outage meant a significant drop in productivity and an increase in workload.
Social media strategist Otiss Manyoba shared his difficulties: “When SocialPilot went down, managing multiple social media accounts became a manual and time-consuming task, which slowed my entire workflow.”
Since AWS holds approximately one-third of the global cloud infrastructure market, outages of this scale can ripple through numerous popular websites and applications. For example, Standard Bank‘s online platforms were briefly affected but have since returned to normal.
This event highlighted the vulnerability of digital entrepreneurs who heavily depend on cloud services in the modern business landscape.
“At first, I thought my internet was the problem,” said Sikhulile Hwalima, founder of Hwalima Digital, a web development agency. “It soon became apparent that AWS supports much of the infrastructure my clients and I rely on. When such a key provider experiences downtime, it not only disrupts productivity but also risks damaging client trust.”
The last AWS outage of comparable scale occurred on June 13, 2023, when AWS Lambda in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region experienced increased error rates and sluggish responses, causing widespread interruptions until services were restored later that day. Other notable outages happened in December 2021 and November 2020, though none matched the global reach of this recent incident.
While AWS has resolved the issue, this episode underscores a pressing challenge for Africa’s growing digital economy: when international cloud infrastructure falters, the consequences are felt immediately by local innovators and enterprises.