Global AWS outage halts digital payments in Fuerteventura this morning

Bizum, card terminals and ATMs were out of service this morning, leaving island merchants in disarray.

“The situation will return to normal soon,” Amazon assured customers.

Although Amazon promised a quick recovery, the incident has reignited the debate over the heavy reliance on a handful of digital‑infrastructure providers.

The morning of Monday, 20 October, will go down as one of the most chaotic days of the year from both a technological and economic standpoint. A massive failure at Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the world’s largest cloud‑services platform—knocked offline numerous internet services (Amazon, Zoom, Trello, Canva, Snapchat, among others) and, crucially, disrupted payment applications worldwide.

Impact in Spain

• Banks affected: BBVA, Santander, Sabadell, Unicaja, Bankinter
• Services disrupted: ATMs, mobile banking apps, card terminals, Bizum
• Result: Thousands of citizens were unable to pay, receive money, or even access their accounts.

Amazon confirmed that the fault originated in one of its primary data centres in the US‑EAST‑1 region, located in northern Virginia. A sudden spike in error rates and latency across several services triggered a domino effect that spread globally. Minutes later, Spanish users of the aforementioned banks began reporting problems with both ATMs and mobile apps, which could no longer display balances or process transfers.

Bizum Outage

Bizum, the instant‑money transfer app used by millions of Spaniards, also went offline. In some cases the app allowed users to start a transaction, but the process stalled at the final step, displaying messages such as “Connection error” or “Operation not completed.”

The outage underscores the vulnerability of economies that depend heavily on a single cloud provider and raises questions about the need for more diversified digital infrastructure.