Amazon’s AWS outage knocked companies like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and extra offline

It felt like half of the web was coping with a hangover from the morning of October 19 to the early hours of October 20. A extreme Amazon Internet Providers outage took out many, many web sites, apps, video games and different companies that depend on Amazon’s cloud division to remain up and operating. That included a protracted checklist of well-liked software program like Venmo, Snapchat, Canva and Fortnite. Even Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa stuttered, and should you have been questioning why the web gave the impression to be towards you — you were not imagining it. The excellent news is that, Amazon announced by 6:53PM Japanese time on October 20 that it resolved the “elevated error charges and latencies for AWS Providers.”

The corporate stated it “recognized the set off of the occasion as DNS decision points for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints.” It bumped into extra issues because it tried to unravel the outage, however it was finally capable of repair all the things. “By 3:01 PM, all AWS companies returned to regular operations,” it stated.

At about 4:30PM ET on October 20, issues gave the impression to be returning again to regular. Apps like Venmo and Lyft, which have been both sluggish to reply or fully nonresponsive earlier than, have been showing to behave easily.

As of 1:15PM ET on October 20, a number of companies have been unavailable, together with asking Alexa for the climate or to show off lights in your house. The Lyft app was additionally slower to reply than normal, and Venmo transactions weren’t finishing.

Based on the AWS service health page on the time, Amazon was trying into “elevated error charges and latencies for a number of AWS companies” within the US-EAST-1 area (i.e. information facilities in Northern Virginia) as of three:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had found out {that a} DNS decision concern with its DynamoDB API was the reason for the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds data for AWS purchasers.

At about 12:08PM ET, the corporate posted a small statement that reiterated the above and added that the “underlying DNS concern was absolutely mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.” Based on the discover, some Amazon “prospects nonetheless proceed to expertise elevated error charges with AWS companies within the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Area as a consequence of points with launching new EC2 cases.” Amazon additionally stated Amazon.com and Amazon subsidiaries, in addition to AWS customer support help operations have been impacted.

“Amazon had the information safely saved, however no person else might discover it for a number of hours, leaving apps briefly separated from their information,” Mike Chapple, a instructing professor of IT, analytics and operations at College of Notre Dame, instructed CNN. “It’s as if massive parts of the web suffered momentary amnesia.”

As of 6:35AM, AWS stated it had absolutely mitigated the DNS concern and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding usually now.” Nevertheless, the knock-on impact prompted points with different AWS companies, together with EC2, a digital machine service on which many firms construct on-line purposes.

At 8:48AM, AWS stated it was “making progress on resolving the difficulty with new EC2 occasion launches within the US-EAST-1 Area.” It really useful that purchasers not tie new deployments to particular Availability Zones (i.e. a number of information facilities in a given area) “in order that EC2 has flexibility” in selecting a zone that could be a greater possibility.

At 9:42AM, Amazon famous on the standing web page that though it had utilized “a number of mitigations” throughout a number of Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “nonetheless experiencing elevated errors for brand new EC2 occasion launches.” As such, AWS was “fee limiting new occasion launches to assist restoration.” The corporate added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “vital API errors and connectivity points throughout a number of companies within the US-EAST-1 Area.” Even as soon as all the problems are resolved, AWS can have a big backlog of requests and different elements to course of, so it’s going to take a while for all the things to recuperate.

Many, many, many firms use US-EAST-1 for his or her AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the web was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of internet sites and different companies have been sluggish or providing up error messages. Outage stories for a broad swathe of companies spiked on Down Detector. Together with Amazon’s personal companies, customers reported points with the likes of banks, airways, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Occasions — sorry to anybody whose Wordle streaks could also be in danger.

Websites like Reddit have posted their own status updates, and although they do not explicitly point out AWS, it is attainable that the companies’ paths might cross someplace within the pipelines.

AWS presents lots of helpful options to purchasers, equivalent to the power for web sites and apps to mechanically scale compute and server capability up and down as wanted to deal with ebbs and flows in site visitors. It additionally has information facilities all over the world. That form of infrastructure is engaging to firms that serve a world viewers and want to remain on-line across the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 %. However incidents equivalent to this spotlight that counting on only a few suppliers to be the spine of a lot of the web is a little bit of an issue.

Replace October 20, 2025, 9:21PM ET: This story has been up to date with Amazon’s newest replace that claims the difficulty has been resolved.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 10:57AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief checklist of companies affected within the intro.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 11:17AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a reference to Reddit’s personal standing replace web site.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 1:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a paragraph reflecting the standing of well-liked companies like Lyft, Venmo and Alexa, primarily based on our editors’ private experiences as of this time.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 3:15PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate a brief assertion from Amazon describing a timeline of occasions, when the underlying concern was mitigated and what elements of Amazon have been impacted.

Replace, Oct 20 2025, 4:30PM ET: This story has been up to date to replicate the standing of companies like Venmo and Lyft as of Monday afternoon.