A significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage was reported on October 20, 2025, causing widespread disruptions across numerous internet services and applications 1. Amazon officially acknowledged the problem on its AWS service status page, confirming "increased error rates" 2. The outage began early on October 20, 2025, with specific reported start times including around 12:11 AM PDT / 3:11 AM EDT and around 1:26 AM PDT 1.
The primary affected region was US-EAST-1, specifically the Northern Virginia data centers, which serves as a critical hub for global internet infrastructure 1. Downdetector reports indicated that 69% of reported problems originated from US-EAST-1 3, leading to widespread global network outages affecting many services worldwide 1.
This AWS outage caused immediate and widespread disruptions across a vast number of popular applications, games, and websites that rely on its cloud infrastructure. Affected services included:
This broad impact underscored the critical reliance of numerous global services on AWS infrastructure.
The AWS outage on October 20, 2025, primarily stemmed from an "operational issue" in the US-East-1 region (North Virginia) . The root cause was identified as a DNS issue, with DNS information stored in DynamoDB 4. This disruption had significant impacts across numerous AWS products and services.
The specific AWS products and services confirmed to be directly impacted, along with the nature of their disruption, are detailed below:
| AWS Service | Nature of Impact |
|---|---|
| DynamoDB | Disrupted, which led to issues for services relying on it 4 |
| Multiple AWS services | Experienced increased error rates and latencies . Reports indicated 20 other services were impacted, causing them to run slowly or have hiccups 4, and 28 AWS services overall experienced issues 5 |
Beyond the core AWS services, the widespread nature of AWS's cloud computing services resulted in significant ripple effects across numerous dependent third-party applications and services globally . These impacted client services included:
The AWS outage that occurred on October 20, 2025, originated from an "operational issue" within the US-East-1 region, specifically located in North Virginia . The fundamental root cause was identified as a DNS issue, which was exacerbated by the fact that critical DNS information was stored in DynamoDB 4. The disruption to DynamoDB 4 had a cascading effect, leading to significant problems for other AWS services that depend on it 4.
Consequently, a broad spectrum of AWS services experienced increased error rates and latencies . Reports indicated that as many as 20 additional services were impacted, resulting in slow performance or operational hiccups 4. In total, 28 AWS services were reported to have experienced issues during this period 5. Given AWS's extensive role in cloud computing, this outage created significant ripple effects, affecting numerous dependent third-party applications and services on a global scale .
It is important to note that based on the conducted searches, comprehensive official communications from AWS, including detailed post-mortem analyses, specific mitigation strategies, or precise recovery timelines, were not readily available. Therefore, the details provided in this section are based on the identified root cause and observed impacts gleaned from the available data.
On October 20, 2025, a significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused widespread disruptions across numerous internet services and applications 1. The incident primarily affected the US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, a critical hub for global internet infrastructure, though other regions like US-WEST-2 and US-WEST-1 also reported issues .
The preliminary root cause was identified as an "operational issue" in US-EAST-1, specifically linked to a DNS issue involving DynamoDB APIs . This led to elevated error rates for DynamoDB APIs and subsequently impacted a wide array of core AWS services. Services such as Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were cited as directly affected 2. Reports indicated that as many as 28 AWS services experienced issues, including SQS, SNS, S3, Route53, RDS, Kinesis, IAM, ECS, and Cloudfront, along with global features dependent on US-EAST-1 endpoints like IAM updates and DynamoDB Global Tables .
The widespread reliance on AWS infrastructure meant the outage had significant ripple effects on countless third-party applications and services globally 1. This included Amazon's own services (Amazon.com, Alexa, Prime Video) 2, major social media platforms (Snapchat, X, Signal) , numerous gaming services (Roblox, Fortnite, PlayStation Network) 2, productivity tools (Canva, Duolingo, Slack) , financial platforms (Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase) 2, and streaming services (Disney+, Hulu) . The comprehensive list of impacted external services underscores the pervasive influence of cloud computing on daily digital life.
The event highlighted the interconnectedness of modern digital infrastructure and the substantial impact that disruptions in foundational cloud services can have across diverse sectors, ranging from social interaction and entertainment to critical financial and government operations . While AWS acknowledged the problem and was actively working on resolution, a definitive timeline for full service restoration was not officially announced at the time of available reports 2. This incident underscores the ongoing challenge of maintaining high availability in distributed cloud environments and the limitations in comprehensive official post-mortem reporting based on publicly available initial details.