Washington: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has renewed her call to break up Big Tech after a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted access to major online platforms and government websites across the globe.
The outage, which lasted nearly 15 hours, affected multiple services dependent on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Users in the U.S. and U.K. reported difficulties accessing apps and websites including Disney+, McDonald’s, Reddit, Robinhood, Ring, and Snapchat.
Quoting a post on X (formerly Twitter) listing the affected companies, Warren wrote:
“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech.”
Her statement reignited debate in Washington over the risks of overreliance on a handful of tech giants — including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — that dominate digital infrastructure.
Warren, a long-time critic of large technology firms, has repeatedly called for stronger antitrust measures to curb their dominance and protect consumers and smaller competitors.
What Caused the AWS Outage
Amazon attributed the disruption to a DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region. The company said the incident began at 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and was fully resolved by 3:01 PM PDT on October 20.
During the outage, services such as Lambda, CloudWatch, and EC2 instance launches were impacted due to cascading network connectivity issues. Amazon later confirmed that all AWS services had returned to normal operations, though some systems continued to process backlogs.
AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., powers thousands of businesses, apps, and public institutions worldwide, making outages particularly disruptive.
The incident underscored Warren’s argument that the concentration of digital power in a few companies poses systemic risks to global internet stability.