Amazon Web Services suffered a significant outage on October 20, 2025, causing widespread disruptions to websites, mobile apps, and corporate systems worldwide. The problem originated in AWS’s Northern Virginia data center region, known as US-EAST-1, which handles a large portion of the company’s global traffic. The outage began early Monday morning and continued for several hours before Amazon restored service later in the day.
The failure stemmed from a breakdown in the domain name system that connects applications to AWS infrastructure. When DNS requests began timing out, applications that relied on cloud databases and storage services failed to connect properly. This created a chain reaction that affected many layers of Amazon’s network and impacted thousands of dependent businesses.
The outage caused major disruptions across multiple industries. Popular apps including Snapchat, Venmo, Roblox, and Fortnite went offline for several hours. E-commerce sites experienced checkout failures, while banks and fintech platforms saw interruptions to transaction processing. Corporate teams using cloud-based tools also faced login errors and delays. Because many of these systems rely on AWS’s shared backend, even a regional issue quickly became a global problem.
Service monitoring companies first detected errors shortly before 8 a.m. UTC, and complaints surged throughout the morning as users across North America and Europe reported access problems. By midafternoon, Amazon confirmed that engineers had identified DNS resolution issues in the affected region. Service was gradually restored by early evening in the United States, though some users reported slow recovery times as systems cleared backlogs.
The outage again highlights the risk of relying heavily on a single cloud provider. US-EAST-1 is one of AWS’s oldest and most widely used regions. Its infrastructure supports many of Amazon’s own products and serves as a default endpoint for countless customer applications. When that region experiences a technical fault, the effects can ripple far beyond its borders.
The incident is expected to renew scrutiny of cloud resilience across industries and government agencies. Many organizations depend on AWS for mission-critical services, and repeated outages have raised concerns about concentration of risk. Regulators in several countries have already begun examining whether large technology companies should be classified as critical infrastructure providers, which would require stricter reliability and reporting standards.
Businesses affected by the outage are likely to reassess their disaster recovery plans. Technology teams will be reviewing whether their systems depend on single-region services and may implement safeguards such as multi-region redundancy, alternative DNS configurations, and more aggressive failover testing. The event also reinforces the importance of clear communication during outages, as some companies were slow to inform users of service interruptions.
Amazon confirmed that all systems were fully operational by the end of the day and said a full post-incident report would be released once its investigation concludes. Customers are watching closely for details on what caused the failure and what steps AWS will take to prevent a repeat.
The outage served as a reminder of how much of the internet depends on a handful of cloud providers. For millions of users, a few hours of downtime were enough to show that when AWS goes down, the world feels it.
