AWS Outage Disrupts Hundreds of Major Sites for Hours

In the early morning of Monday, October 20, 2025, a sudden digital storm swept the world. If you find yourself unable to log into Fortnite, transfer money using Venmo, or even view footage from your Ring doorbell, then you have experienced a massive AWS Outage.

The outage, which began at approximately 3 a.m. ET, paralyzed thousands of websites and services around the world that relied on AWS infrastructure and lasted for several hours. Monitoring sites such as DownDetector received more than 11 million reports of user failures.

This incident once again reminds us in the harshest way: how dependent the modern Internet is on a few cloud giants, and a technical failure can trigger a global domino effect.

The core of the fault: DNS problem in the US-EAST-1 zone

According to Amazon’s official health dashboard, the epicenter of the massive service outage is in its US-EAST-1 region of Northern Virginia.

US-EAST-1 is the oldest and largest data center cluster in the AWS global network. It is known as one of the “nerve centers of the Internet” and the core functions of many global services are hosted here.

What is the real technical reason?

Unlike the initial “traffic balance” speculation, the verified root cause is more specific. AWS reported that the outage stemmed from DNS resolution issues with its DynamoDB, a critical database service.

Simply put, DNS is like the “phone book” of the Internet. When this “phone book” goes wrong, the application cannot find the correct address of the DynamoDB database, causing the connection to fail. Since DynamoDB is the underlying dependency of many other AWS services (such as API Gateway, Lambda, etc.), its failure quickly triggered a chain reaction, causing dozens of AWS services to experience “serious error rates” at the same time.

One of the Largest AWS Outages in History: Who Was Impacted?

The impact of this outage is global, covering almost every aspect of digital life:

• Fintech: Payment and trading platforms like Venmo, Coinbase and Robinhood were completely disrupted.
• Social & Communication: Snapchat, WhatsApp and Signal users cannot send messages.
• Games and Entertainment: Major game servers such as “Fortnite” and “Roblox” were offline, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+ were also affected.
• Productivity tools: Collaboration platforms like Slack, Asana, and Canva are paralyzed.
• News & Public Services: The New York Times gaming section (including Wordle) and the UK government’s HMRC (Hermes Revenue and Customs) website are both inaccessible.
• Amazon’s own services: Ironically, including Alexa smart assistant, Ring smart doorbell and Amazon’s own e-commerce website have also been severely affected.

Exposed vulnerabilities: Are we too reliant on the “Big Three”?

Experts warn that the AWS outage exposed a major vulnerability in the world’s digital infrastructure. When the “Big Three” of Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Google Cloud) occupy the vast majority of the cloud market share, a single point of failure in any one company may turn into a systemic crisis.

Yesterday’s events showed that even the most technologically advanced companies are not immune to technological glitches. For businesses and governments, this is a wake-up call:

• Reevaluate single-cloud dependence: Betting all your critical business on a single provider is extremely risky.
• Invest in elastic architecture: “Multi-Cloud” and “Hybrid-Cloud” strategies—that is, spreading workloads across different cloud providers and private data centers—are no longer optional but a necessity.
• Pursuing Digital Sovereignty: Particularly for government and critical banking services, reducing reliance on such centralized commercial infrastructure has become an urgent topic for discussion.

According to an in-depth analysis of the incident by AP News, the concentration of the US-EAST-1 region made it a recurring failure point.

Although AWS announced on Monday night ET that services were back to normal, the shock caused by this major AWS Outage incident in 2025 will force the entire industry to rethink the resiliency and future of its infrastructure in the next few years.