A massive outage at Amazon Web Services on October 20, 2025, disrupted thousands of websites and apps globally, highlighting the vulnerabilities of cloud-dependent internet infrastructure and raising concerns about the frequency of such events.
The disruption began in the early hours of October 20, 2025, with AWS reporting significant errors in its US-EAST-1 region, affecting core services like DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect. Users worldwide encountered error messages and inaccessible platforms, with popular apps such as Snapchat, Facebook, Fortnite, and Ring doorbell cameras going offline. Social media feeds froze, gaming sessions were interrupted, and smart home devices became unresponsive, illustrating the widespread reliance on AWS for daily digital activities.
AWS identified the root cause as a failure in an internal subsystem that monitors network load balancers within its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The company quickly implemented mitigations, including throttling new instance launches to stabilize the network, and provided regular updates via its health dashboard. Despite initial recovery signs, connectivity issues resurfaced later in the day, prompting further investigations and delays in full restoration.
The outage had tangible impacts on businesses and consumers: airlines like Delta and United experienced minor flight delays, banking apps and cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase were temporarily unavailable, and government services like UK’s HM Revenue and Customs and US Medicare enrollment faced access problems. These disruptions underscored how critical cloud services have become to economic and social functions, with even minor outages causing cascading effects.
Financial experts estimated the total cost could reach hundreds of billions of dollars due to lost productivity and halted operations. Downdetector, a service that aggregates outage reports, recorded over 6.5 million submissions globally, with peaks in the United States and United Kingdom. This scale of impact reflects the concentration of internet services on a few major cloud providers, with AWS accounting for about 37% of the global cloud market share in 2024.
Such outages reveal the fragility of the internet’s backbone, despite its original design for decentralization. Experts note that as more companies migrate to cloud platforms for cost efficiency, they become vulnerable to single points of failure. The AWS incident serves as a stark reminder of the need for robust backup systems and diversified infrastructure to mitigate risks in an increasingly interconnected digital economy.
Recovery efforts continued throughout the day, with AWS announcing full mitigation by the evening, though some services like Lambda experienced lingering issues. The event prompted discussions on improving resilience, with suggestions ranging from investing in redundant systems to adopting multi-cloud strategies. For consumers and businesses alike, the outage emphasized the importance of preparedness for such disruptions in an era where digital connectivity is essential.
Looking ahead, this outage may drive changes in how organizations approach cloud dependency, encouraging greater investment in fail-safes and regulatory oversight. As cloud computing expands, ensuring continuous service availability will remain a key challenge, balancing innovation with reliability to prevent future widespread interruptions.