In the early hours of October 20, 2025, the digital world screeched to a halt as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet’s infrastructure, suffered a massive outage.
Starting around 12:11 a.m. PDT (3:11 a.m. ET, 12:41 p.m. IST), a critical failure in AWS’s US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia triggered widespread disruptions, knocking out major platforms like Snapchat, Amazon Prime Video, Canva, and countless others.
For hours, millions of users worldwide faced frozen apps, inaccessible websites, and stalled workflows, exposing the fragility of our reliance on a single cloud provider.
While AWS declared the core issue resolved by midday, the fallout lingered, sparking debates about the risks of centralized cloud infrastructure.
A Digital Domino Effect
The outage began with a seemingly minor issue: elevated error rates in AWS’s DynamoDB, a critical database service that handles vast data queries for thousands of applications.
By 12:11 a.m. PDT, AWS’s internal monitoring systems detected connectivity problems between customers and its network gateways in the US-East-1 region, a hub hosting over 100 data centers and serving as a critical gateway for global internet traffic.
What started as a hiccup quickly snowballed, as failures in DynamoDB rippled to other core services like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), which power computing and storage for countless platforms.
By 3:00 a.m. ET (12:30 p.m. IST), the impact was undeniable. Real-time outage tracking platforms reported a surge in user complaints, with tens of thousands of reports flooding in for affected services.
Snapchat users couldn’t send messages or load stories; Amazon Prime Video streams stalled with endless buffering;
Canva users found their design projects inaccessible mid-edit. Even critical sectors weren’t spared, with reports of financial trading platforms and healthcare systems experiencing disruptions.
The outage’s global reach stemmed from US-East-1’s role as a primary routing hub, meaning even services hosted elsewhere often depend on its infrastructure for low-latency access.
Timeline of the Outage
The outage unfolded rapidly, with AWS providing updates through its Service Health Dashboard as engineers scrambled to contain the damage. Here’s how the morning played out:
- 12:11 a.m. PDT (12:41 p.m. IST): AWS detects increased error rates in DynamoDB’s API endpoint, pinpointing a DNS resolution failure as the root cause. Initial attempts to mitigate the issue fail.
- 2:00 a.m. PDT (2:30 p.m. IST): Partial recovery efforts show “significant signs of recovery,” but high error rates persist across multiple services.
- 3:35 a.m. ET (1:05 p.m. IST): AWS announces the underlying gateway issue is resolved, though full recovery across all affected systems could take hours due to propagation delays.
- 6:45 a.m. ET (4:15 p.m. IST): Most services return to normal, but some users report lingering delays, particularly in high-traffic applications.
- Noon ET (9:30 p.m. IST): AWS confirms the issue is fully resolved, though sporadic complaints of slow performance continue to surface on social media.
Social media platforms, particularly X, became a sounding board for user frustration. Posts with hashtags like #AWSOutage trended globally, with one user lamenting, “AWS just broke the internet—Snapchat’s dead, Roblox kicked me out, and Canva’s useless.” Another raised alarms about critical infrastructure, noting, “Hospitals shouldn’t be on AWS if one outage can cause this much chaos.”
The Casualties: A Cross-Industry Meltdown
The outage’s scope was staggering, affecting hundreds of companies across diverse sectors. AWS commands roughly a third of the global cloud market, so its failures have outsized consequences. The hardest-hit services included:
- Social Media and Messaging: Snapchat, Signal, Reddit, and WhatsApp users reported login failures, stalled feeds, and undelivered messages. Snapchat, in particular, saw thousands of complaints as users were locked out of their accounts or unable to share updates.
- Entertainment and Gaming: Amazon Prime Video, Fortnite, Roblox, Wordle, Crunchyroll, and Rocket League were among the casualties. Gamers were ejected from servers, and streaming fans faced endless buffering or blank screens.
- Productivity and Creative Tools: Canva users, from freelance designers to corporate teams, lost access to their projects, stalling creative workflows. Other tools like Adobe’s cloud services and Trello also reported issues.
- E-commerce and Finance: Amazon’s own retail platform experienced slowdowns, particularly in payment processing and order tracking. Financial platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase saw intermittent disruptions, raising concerns about market access during volatile trading hours.
- Critical Infrastructure: While less widespread, some healthcare systems and emergency services reported delays, highlighting the risks of relying on cloud providers for mission-critical operations.
The outage underscored how deeply integrated AWS is into the digital ecosystem. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, businesses leaned on backup systems or scrambled to communicate with customers as their primary operations faltered.
The Root Cause: A DNS Disaster
While AWS has not released a detailed postmortem as of this writing, early reports point to a DNS resolution failure as the initial spark.
DynamoDB, which underpins real-time data operations for countless applications, relies on precise DNS routing to connect users to AWS’s infrastructure.
When this routing failed, it severed connections between customers and AWS’s gateways, creating a bottleneck that overwhelmed dependent services.
The US-East-1 region’s centrality exacerbated the issue, as many global services route through it to optimize performance.
This isn’t the first time AWS has faced such a crisis. Similar outages in 2021 and 2022 disrupted services like Netflix and Slack, and each incident exposed the same vulnerability: a single region’s failure can cascade globally.
AWS’s dominance, while a testament to its reliability under normal conditions, becomes a liability when its infrastructure stumbles.
By midday ET, AWS reported that all services were fully operational, but the outage left a lasting impression.
Businesses faced financial losses from downtime, with estimates suggesting millions in lost revenue for e-commerce and advertising platforms alone.
Small businesses and creators reliant on tools like Canva expressed frustration over disrupted workflows, while gamers and streamers voiced annoyance over lost progress and entertainment.
The incident reignited debates about the risks of cloud centralization. AWS’s 34% market share makes it a linchpin of the internet, but its outages reveal a single point of failure for an ecosystem that spans billions of users.
Critics argue that companies must diversify their cloud providers leveraging competitors like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud or invest in hybrid systems to mitigate such risks. However, the cost and complexity of multi-cloud strategies remain prohibitive for many smaller organizations.
For consumers, the outage was a wake-up call about the fragility of digital services we take for granted.
From social media to healthcare, our reliance on cloud infrastructure means a single glitch can disrupt daily life.
On X, one user summed it up: “AWS goes down, and suddenly I can’t work, watch TV, or even send a snap. What’s next, my fridge stops working?”
Lessons and Resilience
AWS is likely to release a detailed report in the coming days, outlining the precise cause and steps to prevent future outages.
For now, the company has emphasized its commitment to reliability, noting that its engineers worked around the clock to restore services. But the incident has already sparked calls for greater transparency and accountability from cloud providers.
Industry experts suggest several paths forward. First, companies must prioritize redundancy, ensuring critical operations aren’t tied to a single region or provider.
Second, regulators may push for stricter oversight of cloud infrastructure, given its role in critical sectors like healthcare and finance.
Finally, consumers and businesses alike may demand better communication during outages, as AWS’s updates, while timely, left many users in the dark about when services would return.
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