Mumbai, October 20, 2025 — A significant disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing platform, has caused widespread connectivity failures for popular online services and apps across the globe today.
The outage, which centered on a critical data region in the US, temporarily crippled some of the world’s most used digital platforms, underscoring the extreme dependence of the global digital economy on a small number of cloud providers.
Key Details of the Outage
- Service Affected: Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the US-EAST-1 Region (Northern Virginia), a vital hub for cloud infrastructure.
- Cause Identified: AWS engineers identified a potential root cause related to an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of its network load balancers. Earlier updates also pointed to issues with DNS resolution for its core database service, DynamoDB.
- Scale of Impact: Downdetector received millions of reports of problems from users globally, with thousands of companies affected.
- Affected Services: The ripple effect took down or severely impacted platforms including:
- Social & Messaging: Snapchat, Signal, Reddit.
- Gaming: Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale.
- Financial & Trading: Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo.
- Amazon Services: Amazon’s main retail website, Prime Video, and Alexa-powered devices also experienced connectivity issues.
- Other Apps: Canva, Duolingo, Wordle, and even some government and banking services (e.g., HMRC in the UK).
AWS Acknowledges and Mitigates the Issue
The technical problems began in the early morning hours, leading to a surge of “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple AWS services.
In a series of updates on its status page, AWS confirmed that its engineers were “actively engaged” in mitigation efforts. The latest reports indicate that:
- Recovery is Underway: AWS has applied initial mitigation steps and is observing “early signs of recovery” for many impacted services.
- Issue Mitigation: The core underlying technical issue has been “fully mitigated,” and “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.”
- Full Resolution Pending: Despite early recovery, the company warned that full resolution will take more time, as some systems still have backlogs of work to process, and some requests may be throttled.
“Too Big to Fail”: Exposing Cloud Dependency
The widespread nature of the disruption immediately reignited a global debate about the over-reliance on a few giant tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for essential global infrastructure.
Experts and analysts noted that a single internal misconfiguration in one AWS region has the power to “pause the internet,” causing potential economic losses that could reach hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars across all affected companies.
While the sheer scale led to viral speculation about a possible external cyberattack, cybersecurity analysts and Amazon engineers have stated that the incident appears to be an internal infrastructure failure, with no evidence of malicious intent or a state-sponsored breach. AWS is expected to release a detailed post-mortem report soon.
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