A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running.
According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e.
However, the knock-on effect caused issues with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.
At 8:48AM, AWS said it was “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
The company added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
It feels like half of the internet is suffering from a hangover on this cool October morning. Many, many websites, apps, games, and other services that depend on Amazon’s cloud division to remain operational were disrupted by a severe outage of Amazon Web Services. This includes a long list of well-known apps like Fortnite, Canva, Snapchat, and Venmo. Even Alexa, the assistant from Amazon, has been stuttering. If you’re wondering why it seems like the internet is against you today, it’s not your imagination.
As of today, October 20, at 1:15 PM ET, it seems that the outage has not been fixed. A number of services are still not available, such as asking Alexa to turn off lights in your house or to check the weather. Although their apps have all shown notifications stating that they are aware of problems affecting their services, Venmo also appears to be down as of right now. It also takes longer than usual for the Lyft app to respond.
The AWS service health page stated that Amazon was investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of Monday at 3:11 AM Eastern Time. AWS discovered by 5:01 AM that the outage was caused by a DNS resolution problem with its DynamoDB API. Information for AWS customers is stored in a database called DynamoDB.
The company posted a brief statement at around 12:08 PM ET, restating the previous points and adding that the “underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.”. Some Amazon customers are still experiencing higher error rates with AWS services in the North, the notice states. due to difficulties launching new EC2 instances in the Virginia (US-east-1) Region. Additionally, AWS customer service support operations, Amazon subsidiaries, and Amazon . com have been affected, according to Amazon.
Mike Chapple, a teaching professor of IT, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame, told CNN that although Amazon had the data securely stored, no one else could locate it for several hours, causing apps to be momentarily separated from their data. It seems like a temporary amnesia struck a large chunk of the internet. “”.
According to AWS, the DNS issue had been completely resolved as of 6:35 AM, and “the majority of AWS Service operations are now proceeding as usual.”. But other AWS services, like EC2, a virtual machine service that many businesses use to create online apps, experienced problems as a result of the ripple effect.
AWS reported that it was “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region” at 8:48 the morning. It suggested that customers refrain from associating new deployments with particular Availability Zones (i.e. E. several data centers in a specific area) “so that EC2 has flexibility” in selecting a zone that might be a better choice.
Despite implementing “multiple mitigations” across multiple Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, Amazon reported on its status page at 9:42 AM that it was “still experiencing elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches.”. To help with recovery, AWS was “rate limiting new instance launches.”. At 10:14 AM, the business also reported “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region).”. “It will take some time for everything to recover because even after all the problems are fixed, AWS will still have a large backlog of requests and other factors to process.
It felt like half of the internet went down on Monday morning because so many businesses use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments. There were a ton of slow websites and other services that displayed error messages as of mid-morning. Down Detector saw an increase in outage reports for a wide range of services. Users also reported problems with banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox, and The New York Times, in addition to Amazon’s own services. We apologize to anyone whose Wordle streaks may be in jeopardy.
Even though Reddit and other websites don’t specifically mention AWS in their status updates, it’s possible that the services’ paths will cross at some point during the pipelines.
Websites and apps can automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle traffic fluctuations, one of the many helpful features that AWS provides to its customers. It has data centers all over the world as well. Businesses that cater to a worldwide clientele and must remain online at all times are drawn to that type of infrastructure. AWS was projected to hold a 30% market share in the global cloud infrastructure market as of the middle of 2025. However, events like this show that it can be problematic to rely on a small number of providers to handle the majority of the internet.
Update, October 20, 2025, 10:57 AM ET: A brief list of the impacted services is now included in the introduction of this story.
Updated at 11:17 AM ET on October 20, 2025: A link to Reddit’s own status update website has been added to this story.
Updated at 1:15 PM ET on October 20, 2025: Based on our editors’ own experiences to date, this story has been updated to include a paragraph that reflects the current state of well-known services like Lyft, Venmo, and Alexa.
