Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant global outage on October 20, 2025, impacting numerous websites and applications worldwide. The outage began early in the day, disrupting operations across key digital sectors including e-commerce, finance, gaming, and media.
The root cause was traced to AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, where several critical services such as DynamoDB and EC2 instances experienced elevated error rates and delays. AWS confirmed these issues around 12:11 a.m. Eastern Time and immediately mobilized its engineering teams to address the fault.
This disruption cascaded across a wide spectrum of major online platforms and services. Amazon’s flagship sites including Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa, and Ring were affected. Financial apps such as Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, and Chime faced intermittent outages, complicating transactions for users globally. Social media platforms including Snapchat and Reddit, popular gaming services like Fortnite, Roblox, and PUBG, as well as widely used design and productivity tools including Canva and Duolingo also reported downtime or degraded performance.
Media consumption platforms such as Disney+ and Apple TV experienced interruptions, demonstrating the wide-reaching effects of the outage. The situation also impacted traditional banking services in the UK, including Lloyds and Halifax, where customers experienced transaction delays.
Amazon’s AWS team worked relentlessly throughout the day, gradually restoring service functionality. By late afternoon U.S. time, AWS reported significant recovery progress with most services returning to normal operation. However, some users in Europe and Asia continued to experience residual issues as the backlog of delayed requests was processed.
This outage underlines the critical reliance of global digital infrastructure on AWS, a cloud provider that supports an extensive array of internet-based services. The scale of the disruption has reminded businesses and consumers alike of the vulnerabilities inherent in centralized cloud ecosystems.
AWS outage was a sudden, widespread failure triggered in the US-EAST-1 region, with extensive impact across financial, social, gaming, and media platforms worldwide. AWS’s response restored most services within hours, but the incident has reignited discussions on cloud resilience and dependency.
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