On this crisp October morning, it looks like half of the web is coping with a hangover. A extreme Amazon Net Providers outage took out many, many web sites, apps, video games and different companies that depend on Amazon’s cloud division to remain up and operating. That features a lengthy record of well-liked software program like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa has been stuttering, and should you’re questioning why the web appears to be towards you at this time — you are not imagining it.
As of 1:15PM ET at this time (October 20), it seems the outage has not been resolved. A number of companies stay unavailable, together with asking Alexa for the climate or to show off lights in your house. Venmo additionally appears to be down nonetheless, although their apps have all displayed alerts saying they’re conscious of points plaguing their companies. The Lyft app can also be slower to reply than normal.
In line with the AWS service well being web page, Amazon was wanting into “elevated error charges and latencies for a number of AWS companies” within the US-EAST-1 area (i.e. knowledge facilities in Northern Virginia) as of three:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had found out {that a} DNS decision situation with its DynamoDB API was the reason for the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds data for AWS shoppers.
At about 12:08PM ET, the corporate posted a small assertion that reiterated the above and added that the “underlying DNS situation was totally mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.” In line with the discover, some Amazon “clients nonetheless proceed to expertise elevated error charges with AWS companies within the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Area attributable to points with launching new EC2 situations.” Amazon additionally mentioned Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, in addition to AWS customer support help operations have been impacted.
“Amazon had the information safely saved, however no person else may discover it for a number of hours, leaving apps briefly separated from their knowledge,” Mike Chapple, a educating professor of IT, analytics and operations at College of Notre Dame, advised CNN. “It’s as if massive parts of the web suffered momentary amnesia.”
As of 6:35AM, AWS mentioned it had totally mitigated the DNS situation and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding usually now.” Nonetheless, the knock-on impact brought on points with different AWS companies, together with EC2, a digital machine service on which many corporations construct on-line purposes.
At 8:48AM, AWS mentioned it was “making progress on resolving the problem with new EC2 occasion launches within the US-EAST-1 Area.” It really useful that shoppers not tie new deployments to particular Availability Zones (i.e. a number of knowledge facilities in a given area) “in order that EC2 has flexibility” in selecting a zone that could be a greater possibility.
At 9:42AM, Amazon famous on the standing web page that though it had utilized “a number of mitigations” throughout a number of Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “nonetheless experiencing elevated errors for brand new EC2 occasion launches.” As such, AWS was “price limiting new occasion launches to assist restoration.” The corporate added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “important API errors and connectivity points throughout a number of companies within the US-EAST-1 Area.” Even as soon as all the problems are resolved, AWS can have a big backlog of requests and different components to course of, so it will take a while for all the pieces to get well.
Many, many, many corporations use US-EAST-1 for his or her AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the web was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of internet sites and different companies had been sluggish or providing up error messages. Outage studies for a broad swathe of companies spiked on Down Detector. Together with Amazon’s personal companies, customers reported points with the likes of banks, airways, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Instances — sorry to anybody whose Wordle streaks could also be in danger.
Websites like Reddit have posted their very own standing updates, and although they do not explicitly point out AWS, it is doable that the companies’ paths might cross someplace within the pipelines.
AWS presents a number of helpful options to shoppers, comparable to the power for web sites and apps to routinely scale compute and server capability up and down as wanted to deal with ebbs and flows in visitors. It additionally has knowledge facilities world wide. That sort of infrastructure is enticing to corporations that serve a world viewers and want to remain on-line across the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 %. However incidents comparable to this spotlight that counting on just some suppliers to be the spine of a lot of the web is a little bit of an issue.
Replace, Oct 20 2025, 10:57AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief record of companies affected within the intro.
Replace, Oct 20 2025, 11:17AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a reference to Reddit’s personal standing replace web site.
Replace, Oct 20 2025, 1:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a paragraph reflecting the standing of well-liked companies like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, primarily based on our editors’ private experiences as of this time.
Replace, Oct 20 2025, 3:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief assertion from Amazon describing a timeline of occasions, when the underlying situation was mitigated and what components of Amazon have been impacted.
