Massive AWS Outage Brings The Internet To Its Knees, Here's The Latest Status Update

by Aaron Leong — Monday, October 20, 2025, 10:21 AM EDT

A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, crippled major websites, apps, and corporate services across the globe this morning. Thankfully, Amazon has been on the case (having dealt with biggies like this in the past) and most key services are already back online.

The disruption began shortly after midnight ET in AWS's US-EAST-1 region—Amazon's largest data hub in Northern Virginia. Within minutes, the effects rippled out worldwide, bringing down services from gaming and social media to e-commerce and finance.

Brownie points to you if you're already guessing that the main cause of the blackout is DNS-related. Specifically, AWS engineers traced the issue to a DNS/gateway path failure affecting the DynamoDB core database service. And since the US-EAST-1 region powers a significant chunk of the internet, a failure there quickly cascaded into a global problem.

aws outage1 — *Small sample of service affected by AWS outage (Credit: Down Detector)*

Some of high-profile casualties were popular gaming titles like Fortnite and Roblox that prevented millions of players from logging in. Snapchat, Signal, and Slack users reported widespread failures on the respective apps. Amazon’s own empire was hit, of course, with Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa all experiencing significant problems. Robinhood and payment services like Venmo also saw connectivity issues, alongside education platforms like Duolingo.

Thus, AWS engineers moved quickly to apply mitigations, confirming that they had identified the root cause and were seeing "significant signs of recovery" within a few hours. However, the company warned that a massive backlog of queued requests meant lingering issues and increased latency were likely throughout the day as systems slowly returned to full functionality.

The incident reminds us how much the internet relies of AWS and how fragile the infrastructure is. While companies invest in cloud redundancy by using multiple "availability zones" within a region, this failure proved that even intra-region redundancy is insufficient if the root problem affects the fundamental underlying network or core data services of the entire hub.

Perhaps this outage might subsequently trigger a fresh round of audits by major companies, forcing them to consider different multi-region/multi-cloud strategies to ensure that a single point of failure at one provider cannot paralyze global operations. On the bright side, many crucial services—such as Zoom, Strava, and Reddit—seem to be back up and running, just in time for the start of the work and school day.