On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a significant outage originating from its Northern Virginia data center (US-EAST-1), which disrupted numerous major apps and websites worldwide. The root problem traced back to DNS resolution failures affecting the DynamoDB API, one of the core database services that many applications rely on.
This outage triggered widespread service timeouts and errors across key platforms including Slack, Atlassian, Snapchat, Reddit, and even internal Amazon services. The disruption, which began around 07:55 UTC, highlighted the heavy dependence of modern internet services on AWS infrastructure.
AWS responded by throttling certain operations like EC2 instance launches to control the impact and started recovery efforts shortly after. Normal service levels were restored by roughly mid-afternoon Pacific Time, with full functionality returning by 15:01 PDT (22:01 UTC). Despite these efforts, residual processing delays continued for several hours in backend systems.
The incident was attributed to internal DNS problems within DynamoDB, combined with subsystem failures that impaired health monitoring of network load balancers responsible for distributing traffic. AWS confirmed that no external network issues or cybersecurity events compounded the situation.
This event temporarily affected not only customer-facing apps but also Amazon.com and AWS support functions, underscoring how interconnected and centralized cloud infrastructure has become in supporting global online platforms and services.
Experts noted that this outage emphasizes the risks tied to concentrated cloud dependencies and the complexity involved in maintaining such large-scale infrastructure. Millions of users worldwide experienced intermittent access issues, performance slowdowns, and feature disruptions on affected services.
AWS advised customers to monitor the AWS Health Dashboard for real-time updates during the outage and has since worked on improving internal monitoring and response strategies to reduce the risk of recurrence.
Overall, this significant disruption served as a reminder of the critical role cloud providers like AWS play in the digital ecosystem and the cascading impact their outages can have across industries and consumers worldwide.
