Major Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outage Disrupts Global Internet Services
On Monday, 20 October 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant cloud-infrastructure outage that rippled across the internet, causing widespread disruption for high-profile apps, streaming services, financial platforms, and smart-home devices alike. The outage began in the early hours of the morning in the US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region, when AWS reported elevated error rates and increased latency across its service infrastructure.
According to AWS’s official status updates, the issue originated from the company’s internal monitoring and health subsystem for its network load balancers. The company noted that the root cause appears to be a DNS resolution problem for the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-East-1. The initial incident was logged around 3:11 a.m. ET, with the first updates indicating that engineers were working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” Although most services were confirmed to be recovering by mid-morning, many users reported residual issues extending into the afternoon.
The impact was dramatic and far-reaching. Services built on AWS infrastructure — including social apps like Snapchat, gaming platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox, and smart-home assistants like Alexa — all experienced disruptions. Financial apps, including Venmo and Robinhood, and enterprise tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams also saw service degradation. In the UK, major banks and government services reported outages, with regulators swiftly contacting AWS about the incident. A detailed breakdown published by Tom’s Guide listed more than 100 significant services impacted.
In an official statement, AWS wrote: “We are seeing increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in the US-East-1 Region. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery of the underlying subsystem responsible for health monitoring of our network load balancers.” While the company confirmed that the underlying cause was internal and not malicious, the scale of the disruption has reignited broader concerns about concentration of internet infrastructure in a small number of cloud-providers.
Industry analysts emphasised that the outage underlines how dependent global digital infrastructure has become on providers like AWS. With thousands of companies reliant on a handful of regions and services, any disruption can cascade across sectors in minutes. “The world now runs on the cloud,” noted one cybersecurity expert. “When there’s an issue like this, it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox.”
The duration of the outage, while measured in hours, translated into significant downtime for consumers and businesses alike. AWS reported full mitigation of the incident around 6:35 a.m. ET, though residual effects persisted for some time after. Some services posted updates throughout the day explaining that, while primary connectivity had resumed, backlogs of requests and cascading micro-services dependencies meant some features remained sluggish.
For businesses and individual users, this outage is a stark reminder of the fragility of cloud-based services. It prompts questions about redundancy, multi-region architecture, and dependency on single-provider ecosystems. While AWS continues to offer post-event summaries for major incidents, the episode of 20 October 2025 will likely drive increased regulatory scrutiny and customer demand for transparency and resilience.
