A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that disrupted thousands of websites and apps worldwide has raised alarm among cybersecurity experts, who warn that the incident creates a “perfect phishing storm.”
More than six million user reports were logged in the outage’s early hours, putting affected individuals at elevated risk of scams that exploit confusion, urgency, and compromised services.
The outage began in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia and quickly cascaded through its global infrastructure, affecting major digital platforms including Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Coinbase, and many others.
AWS attributed the failure to a monitoring subsystem malfunction impacting load balancers and DNS resolution rather than a cyberattack.
Cybersecurity analysts say that major outages create conditions ripe for exploitation.
Disruptions leave users unable to access accounts and services, heightening urgency and panic—prime triggers for phishing schemes.
Scammers can craft highly convincing messages claiming to be from affected services, offering “account recovery,” “refunds,” or “discounts” tied to the outage. AI-facilitated phishing tools make this even easier.
With backend systems unstable, legitimate verification and support processes may be delayed, reducing user confidence and increasing susceptibility to malicious prompts.
Charlotte Wilson, enterprise head at Check Point Software, explained that during outages, users should expect a spike in fake “refund” or “discount” offers, phishing emails, and scam links claiming to fix the problem.
Security experts recommend the following steps:
The outage highlights the dangers of heavy reliance on a single cloud provider. When AWS falters, its disruption can cascade across industries: from banking and e-commerce to consumer apps and infrastructure. Experts say this incident also underscores the need for organizations to plan for alternative infrastructure, segmented access controls, and resilience to social engineering risks triggered by service failures.